Cat Person was an impulse borrow from the library, because I am a person and I like cats. What I found in Seo Kim's Cat Person is either a highly sophisticated piece of modern art beyond my comprehension or a bunch of barely connected doodles from a professional cartoonist that she did in her off time and decided to publish. There is no introduction, afterword, or anything really to explain what this book is. It's just the art.

The art in Cat Person depicts Kim going about her daily life as a slightly awkward, lonely person who forever feels like they aren't "adult." She plays with the cat, she cleans, she poops, she burns a grilled cheese, and she mismanages her sleep schedule. It's incredibly mundane, but in that mundanity, highly, highly relatable. She struggles like I'm struggling: sometimes her drawings are barely comprehensible pencil sketches, where you can feel the inner fight to produce something, anything. Sometimes the drawings are in effortless full color. This book would be an anthropologist's gold mine for what run-of-the-mill life in the 21st century contains. Like, idk, man, we were covered in cat fur and trying real hard against impossible odds to exist.

My question for Cat Person is about intent. Maybe this is a bunch of art a cartoonist made on little napkins while she waited for her food to microwave and they mean nothing. Maybe she is depicting her daily life because the true message is that life, no matter how silly or basic or boring, is art. Even the mundane is powerful, profound, and worthy of attention.

I literally cannot tell what is going on here. But I laughed and the drawings are real cute, so three stars?