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| Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted at Breaking the Spine that spotlights eagerly anticipated upcoming releases. |
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| You can purchase your own copy of this book here at Amazon. |
When loyal dog Mutt discovers that his owner and best friend Alice is set to board the RMS Titanic without him, he is determined to follow her across the ocean. With the help of King Leon the rat, Mutt sneaks aboard, but it isn't long before the Captain's cat, Clara, discovers the stowaway. Reluctantly, Clara agrees to help Mutt find Alice, on the condition that he help her look after a trio of abandoned kittens she found in a lifeboat. But when the unthinkable happens and the so-called unsinkable ship hits an iceberg, Mutt and his new friends have to race against the clock to reunite with their humans--and to survive.
Unlike many of my Middle Grade choices for Waiting on Wednesday, The Titanic doesn't have the most eye-catching cover. The title font and colors in particular are a little wonky, and one of the two cover versions available on Goodreads (I'm not sure which, if any, is the official/correct version) has a strange, not particularly appealing color palette. There's not especially objectionable about the whole thing, of course... but there are so many gorgeous dog-or-cat covers in MG that this one leaves me a little disappointed.
But let it never be said that I judged a book by its cover! I'm a sucker for animal stories of all shapes and sizes (you know, except for the ones that exist for no purpose other than to kill off the animals in question...), and The Titanic is an animal story if ever there was one. If the Goodreads description is anything to go by, it's the story of a dog and a rat and a cat and three kittens trying to save people on board the doomed as all get-out RMS Titanic.
Now, I'll admit that sounds like it might be a kind of busy story, but I am more than willing to give it a chance. The sinking of the Titanic is a frequently rehashed historical storyline (for lack of a better word), being a tragedy distant enough in our memory so as not to evoke devastating emotions and enough of a cultural touchstone after the DiCaprio film
to feel familiar to most readers, that doesn't quite yet feel hackneyed, and the team-up between sentient cats and dogs calls up (for me, at least) fondly nostalgic memories of the Homeward Bound
movies.If the story's solid, this could easily be a series I'll follow to its end.
What books are you waiting on this week? You can let me know in the comments below!
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