Mark Reads ‘The Book of Night With Moon’: Chapter 1, Part I

In the first part of the first chapter of The Book of Night With Moon, a danger lurks on the tracks, and Rhiow responds. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to start Feline Wizards. 

Hello, friends, IT’S HAPPENING!!! Today, I begin the first book in the Feline Wizards trilogy! At this point, we’ll progress through The Book of Night With Moon, and then the remainder of the series will be read at a later date once I have time to do a quicker round of double features. At the very least, though, I wanted to read this book to get a taste for an alternate look at the Young Wizards universe and to fulfill commissions that folks have been patiently waiting for these past couple years. AND IT’S HERE!

So, I assumed that since this was set in the same universe and because of the title that this would all deal with the cat wizards we’d seen before. In particular, I had hoped that Rhiow would be a focus, and indeed she is! But Diane Duane DID NOT GIVE ME THIS EASILY. The opening of this book is very different from the Young Wizards series, and I loved the departure in how this was framed. Second-person is not an easy thing to pull off, but the sequence Duane gives us is so haunting and captivating. I admit I’m biased because I love train stations and practically anything written around them. Which makes me excited about this book, since it’s about the cat wizards who man the gates at Grand Central. (I’m hazarding a guess at this point, but I don’t think it’s too risky of one.) Truthfully, there’s something gorgeous about transit hubs at night. They are liminal spaces; they are portraits of possibility; they are eerie and altogether beautiful. Grand Central late at night is particularly strange, especially since it’s such a busy, boisterous place during the day. The first time you go there late at night, when there are only a few MTA and Metro-North patrons rushing off to work or home after long days (or if their day is just starting), there’s a sense of volume to the building. Less full, it echoes more. It feels larger. You feel tinier. You marvel at the sheer impossibility of a building so grand and so well-designed existing. How did they do that? How does it stand so tall and proud when gravity and entropy is begging it to plunge to the ground? 

It is within this space that Duane sets this book. (At least at first, that is.) I imagine if you came into this without any knowledge of the Young Wizards universe, it would still make sense; there’s worldbuilding here, but it’s not impossible to decipher without prior knowledge of the series as a whole. Hell, I imagine this opening is a million times creepier if you don’t know about gates and wizardry. Which isn’t to minimize how creepy it was to me. WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT THING??? Claws? Bipedal? “Razory” fangs? “Gemlike” eyes? Hi, no, thank you. HARD PASS. So, something was able to travel through the gates at Grand Central in a manner that was out of the norm, and it arrive specifically to murder everything??? Because that’s all we get before Duane cuts away to Rhiow, awakened by some sort of notification via wizardry. So??? Murder demon? Murder alien? Murder… being?

I don’t know. This wasn’t the only “new” thing that Duane gives us in this chapter either. On top of this mysterious creature, there’s the cat language, which is apparently impossible to replicate if you’re human! Which is… real fun for my videos. I TRIED, OKAY. But my favorite thing about this—and perhaps the element of this novel I’m most excited for—is that Duane does not waste a single opportunity to get inside the mind of a cat and build a believable worldview once there. Y’ALL, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY HOW CATS THINK, I QUESTION NONE OF THIS. Of course they’re smarter than us! Of course their language is intense, complicated, and nuanced, and of course we interpret it as much simpler than it actually is. Y’all, how many of you have a cat who is a picky eater? I had a cat years ago who only ate dry food mixed in with wet food, and both had to be a specific brand from WHOLE FOODS and NOTHING ELSE. And both those cats also would wake me early every morning, screeching at me as if they had never been fed a day in their lives. WHY. WHY ARE CATS SO OFTEN EXACTLY LIKE THIS. 

So yeah, this was a delight to read based on this alone. There’s a lot to love otherwise, and it’s been a while since I read something from the perspective of a non-human. (Aside from Mavish’s “On Ordeal” story, that is.) The text is immersive, and it was easy to figure out the cat language from context clues practically every time. Thus, I didn’t have to spend nearly any time with translation, which allowed me to just jump right into Rhiow’s head. There’s a sense of her routine in this section, too, and I imagine we’ll learn more about what she normally does on a day-to-day basis. So, the question remains: what woke her up? Was that weird MURDER BEING responsible for the alarm in her mind? Is she about to stumble onto something grisly and terrifying? I’M READY.

Just kidding, I’m not.

https://youtu.be/tFMj5D_lf_k

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