Cat Massage:
Expert Know-How at Your Fingertips
By Nicola Routledge
Illustrated by Bo Lundberg

For the most part this was a fun book, mainly because it's show-and-tell - your human has to take its techniques and do them on you. It's clearly not for the brightest of humans - it explains really basic stuff like body language and cat sounds. I mean, if a human needs to know the meaning of purring or ears turned back, they have to be pretty lame. Personally, if my human were that stupid, I don't think I'd let her touch me, much less massage me. But it does go over, however briefly, some things that humans may be too careless to think about - the skeletal and muscle system, for example. Most of the book is dedicated to various cat massage techniques (funny, I thought palming, or effleurage was just petting). Most of these feel pretty good, although I was not too sure about the drumming technique. The rest of it - stroking the tail, leg massages and such - were nice. There are also tips on massaging kittens, new mothers and older cats. My human thought the illustrations by Swedish artist Bo Lundberg were "whimsical" and "cute." I, on the other hand, was kind of disappointed that they didn't use actual photos of cats being massaged. But at least it got my human busy massaging me, and that's definitely a good thing! Oh, and this is just a minor detail, but something that cats may want to know - this book tastes good! I took a few chunky bites out of it while being massaged and I thought I was in heaven!

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