Book: Freddy’s Magic Garden
Author: Angelina Dayan
Genre: Biographies, memoirs, stories
Review copy: Reedsy Discovery
Available at: Amazon.in
Recommended: Must Read
Get yourself a little something this Valentine’s Day – A delightful, warm, and fuzzy book that tells of feline adventures and is brimming with utmost love and affection.
Freddy’s Magic Garden by Angelina Dayan is a warm and fuzzy novella, perfect for the winter months. It contains stories filled with much love and affection for our furry friends. It is about friendship, guardianship, and hope. The book has been written with much tenderness and the feelings ooze out of the pages, instantly warming the heart.
With human and feline narrators, the storytelling is lively and can make for a good bedtime read for children. The cat portraits give faces to the names of frolicky balls of fur. A more vibrant portfolio of the cats in different settings around the house and garden would have made this into an exotic coffee-table book. The book is a testimony of how caring for fur babies, tugs at your heartstrings and can keep you up at night and days, in anxiety for their well-being. The commitment to care for another living being is difficult and must only be taken up if one will go the extra mile.
The stories of the cats, as told in their voice, are engaging and humorous. You feel drawn into their world. From their experiences with the breeders to waiting for their human family, to antics and escapades, these cats have a full life of adventure. In Uddy’s escapades, the author seems to channel Orwell’s Animal Farm, including a visionary piglet. There is a reference to Elon Musk’s feline alter ego, and it’s hilarious – “What you need, Uddy is to go to Mars. But hurry up before that human gets ahead of you, that Mewlon Husk,” he advised. I would have loved more farm stories, but it was a small part of the larger feline saga.
This is a fabulous book to understand the world of cats, particularly Maine Coons. As it is with life, the cats face losses and challenges, but with love and care, they bounce back. With the largesse of the heart, even a small home can become a heaven for little bundles of joy. The cat family grows by leaps and bounds and there is much joy to be shared and observed. Freddy’s Magic Garden is a perfect book for animal lovers and if you can not get enough of these stories, then like me, you can top it up with a 2022 Netflix film – Inside the mind of a cat.
Blue Pen Strokes 
I do love a good cat story Aneesha. Fabulous. We see these guys – along with dogs – all over town in our current location, in Turkey. Fun too because local people care for all street cats and street dogs; one big, happy family here.
Ryan
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I love cats and this book was delightful to read. Where I stay in India, there are more dogs and cows around, not cats. But, I have seen cats in some cities in India like Goa and they add to the lazy character of the place.
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