As I mentioned on my bio page, we have two Siberian cats. While I was raised with dogs – literally (a story I’ll save for another post!) – and never particularly cared for cats, Siberians are a breed apart. While the reasons we wound up with cats are best saved for yet another post, when I looked into the breed’s history I found some rather intriguing intersections with human history.
In particular, cats that are generally considered to be the root stock of the modern Siberian cat breed played a vital role in bringing under control the raging rat population in Leningrad after the city’s long seige by Nazi forces during the Second World War. They were captured in the general region of Tomsk, Siberia, and taken by the thousands to Leningrad and released to fight the rats.
This got me to thinking, what if the cats played more of a role in the war than what people saw on the surface?
That’s the premise behind this tale-in-progress, which I’ve given the working title of Cat Tales. I’ve only got the first two chapters here in rough form, but I’d appreciate any comments you might have on it, especially (assuming you like it!) what genre it would fit into. I’m thinking young adult fiction, but I’ve never written for that particular market and don’t know if this would fit. So, any opinions would be welcome!
Cat Tales – Chapters 1 and 2 in PDF format.
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