The Weekly Pour: Cat Love by Tomas Q. Morin
Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to The Weekly Pour — our little Tuesday tradition where we pull a brand-new release off the shelf, find it the perfect something to sip, and save you a seat. Pour’s ready. Chair’s open. If there’s a cat in your lap at home, give it a scratch from us before you settle in, because this week’s book is going to make you hold it a little tighter.
Think of this corner as your living-room-away-from-home. Some weeks we hand you a beach read and a bright glass of bubbles. This week we’re doing something quieter and braver: a slim, strange, unforgettable debut narrated by a cat, that somehow ends up being about all of us. Curl up. We’ll explain.
About the Book - Cat Love
Our narrator is a tortoiseshell cat who once had a good life and a person she loved — a man she calls, with great dignity, “the Mustache.” When we meet her, that life is gone. She’s been taken from home and sealed inside a one-way mirrored box: a living, breathing Schrödinger’s experiment, set up in a classroom where students must sit and contemplate her fate as part of their training to become “Emotional Support Humans.”
From inside that box, she remembers. She tells us about the poetry she absorbed, the music that played, the small daily comforts of being loved — the very best things a society can make — even as the world outside the glass has tipped into violence and intolerance. It’s a dystopian elegy with whiskers: funny one sentence, devastating the next, and only 224 pages from first purr to last. Where it all lands is for you and your glass to discover.
It’s the debut novel from Tomás Q. Morín, an award-winning poet and memoirist (a Guggenheim and NEA fellow who has translated Neruda), which explains the sentences — every image is doing double duty.
Why We Love It
The voice. Our feline narrator is dry, erudite, vain, and quietly heartbroken — exactly the cat you’d expect to quote philosophy at you and then knock a pen off the desk. You’ll be laughing on one page and blinking back tears on the next.
A thought experiment with a heartbeat. Plenty of books are clever about Schrödinger’s cat. This one makes the cat a someone, not a concept, and the whole conceit suddenly aches.
Big questions, small package. Freedom, dignity, empathy, what we owe the creatures in our care — Morín fits it all into a single, sittable evening.
A poet’s eye. The prose is image-driven and precise, the kind of writing that rewards reading slowly with something warm in hand.
It’s a perfect book-club provocateur. Tender, weird, and deeply discussable — bring it to the nook and watch the conversation go everywhere.
Perfect For Fans Of: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Bees by Laline Paull, or Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
This Week’s Pour: Milk Truck Latte Stout by Mother Earth
A book this cozy-but-melancholy wants something dark, comforting, and a little indulgent — a drink you nurse slowly. So this week we’re reaching for the Milk Truck Latte Stout by Mother Earth. Call it the saucer of milk our narrator deserved: roasty, smooth, gently sweet, the liquid equivalent of a warm lap against a cold world. This stout is dark, creamy, and quietly sweet — it mirrors the book’s soft heart beating under a grim premise, and yes, it’s the closest thing on our menu to a bowl of milk for a very good cat.
If you’re not drinking, reach for an Upside Upside Dawn Golden — Athletic Brewing Co. A bright, easygoing golden that keeps the contemplative mood going, no proof required. Either option is best sipped slow. Kirkus said it best — best enjoyed “with a record playing and a cat on the reader’s lap.” We couldn’t set a better scene.
Come Read With Us
Grab your copy of Cat Love off the New Releases shelf, claim a comfortable seat, and let us pour you something to go with it. Read it in one sitting, or stretch it across a slow afternoon — either way, come tell us how it landed. We have a feeling this one’s going to start conversations.
Have you already read it? Tell us in the comments who you’d cast as the Mustache — and follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok (@thebookloungeid) for next week’s Pour, event news, and a peek behind the shelves.
Happy Reading (and Sipping!),
The Book Lounge Crew
