About A Cat’s Cradle

Nobody is innocent, nobody tells the truth…
Perhaps, in the darkness, Ralph thinks of the other child, the child whom he killed all those years ago. But he will not say so: he has served his time. After all, he was little more than a child himself when he went to prison for it. He is older now and the world has moved on.
Only his ailing mother – who wishes he had been hanged – knows that he is out. She will not speak of him. Nobody wants him.
Nobody except Mary, a little girl from outside the village, who meets him one afternoon after chasing his mother’s cat. Perhaps he thinks of the other child then, but there is really no connection. The other child had been beautiful, which Mary wasn’t. The other child wanted everything, but Mary wants nothing except his friendship.
Everyone needs a friend. What could be the harm in that?

My Review

A superbly narrated psychological thriller set in 1962, A Cat’s Cradle will chill readers to the bone with its artfully deceptive narration. If you were to skip the first two pages, the novel reads as innocent as an Enid Blyton tale. A Cat’s Cradle is anything but. The depths of insight into childhood naivety, and the motivations, prejudices and self-justifications of adults is profound.

Seven-year-old Mary follows a wounded cat to an old house outside her village and encounters Ralph, a strange young man who is visiting his ageing and ill mother. They form and unlikely friendship, both of them loners seeking some form of happiness.

With every chapter that passes, Mary is led or lured ever more into the web woven from her by ex-con and child abuser and murderer Ralph, a man who appears not to know any other way of being, The up-close domestic feel that pervades the narrative contributes to the foreboding atmosphere as what may be passed over or hurried thorough in other novels is put under the microscope for detailed examination.

Ralph slowly erodes Mary’s boundaries by creating a fantasy world for them both to inhabit. It is their secret. He does wrestle with his conscience, he is in a perpetual state of crisis, and yet he is driven by compulsions he seems unable to understand, let alone transcend. And so it must be Mary’s fault, mustn’t it.

Meanwhile, everyone has a part to play in the village community of Heckleford. A harried and thoroughly disempowered mother abandoned by her husband and left poor and desperate, too proud and filled with shame and humiliation to seek help. Mary’s two older brothers who really can’t be bothered keeping an eye on their little sister. The harsh and judgmental grandmother. Mary’s ex-friend, Rita. What unfolds is a conspiracy of circumstances with an unexpected and dramatic ending. I commend the author for taking on such a difficult subject and doing so with such aplomb that the unfolding story holds the attention regardless.

About the Author

Carly Rheilan was born in Malta and lives in the UK. She was educated in Oxford University (which she hated and left) and then at Brunel (a small-town technological university where she stayed for a PhD). As an academic and a psychiatric nurse she has done research into criminal justice, taught in universities and worked for many years in the NHS. She has children of her own and has also fostered two children with mental health problems.

Her novels address issues at the edges of psychiatry, crime and personal trauma.

Asylum tells the story of Cabdi, the survivor of an African massacre, and Mustaf, a trafficked childCats Cradle tells the story of a relationship between a child and a paedophileBirthRights is a story about a childless psychiatrist seeking a fraudulent motherhood

When not writing her own novels, Carly promotes the work of other indie authors through the book promotion company Coffee and Thorn. She also boxes (joyfully but badly), rages against the decline of left wing politics in her unequal country (pointlessly), campaigns for the introduction of parole in Mississippi (without success), and fights a solitary battle against acres of nettles in a community garden (so far the nettles are winning). But most of all, she loves to spend time with her family, who forgive her failures and make her happy.

Purchase link: https://mybook.to/CatsCradle