This book was so much fun, I had a great time. P. Djèlí Clark manages to be funny while staying grounded. The characters and the magic were great and the plot was simple but entertaining.

Thank you Netgalley/Tor for the ARC.

P. Djeli Clark has become a favorite for his world building, dry humor, and well developed characters, and The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is no exception. The Dead Cat Tail Assassins follows Eveen the Eviscerator, a member of The Dead Cat Tail Assassins Guild. We follow her as she starts on a new contract when things start to go a bit unusual. The characters are all fun and fleshed out, and you can see Eveen traveling through Tal Abisi through the story. I loved the Assassins, and would gladly read more of their tales should Clark decide to revisit the world of Tal Abisi.

This story just didn’t grab me and I mostly was bored throughout. I really liked A Master of Djinn by the same author but for some reason, probably a fault of my own, I just could not get into this one.

The story centers around a dead but undead Eveen, a hired assassin resurrected by the goddess Aeril who is the head of the guild. One of the core rules of the assassins are to always compete the job.

But, in a big twist, Eveen is sent to assassinate someone and…she just can't. For reasons that will be a spoiler here.
The rest of the story is about Eveen trying to avoid fulfilling the contract, and might have even nodded off a few times while reading it. The background, setting, and characters were kind of interesting but I'd pass on this one had I not felt compelled to finish it.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Is this book amazing? Not particularly. But is it FUN? Absolutely. There are so many interesting aspects of the world, gods, and magic system that I loved. What was lacking, though, was great character work. However, the premise and world were that compelling that I never considered putting the story down.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for a digital advanced copy of this e-book in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this quick little novella. It was fast paced, a little self aware, and funny! It could be due to recency bias but the book gave me Hazbin Hotel vibes. Mostly in the way the characters act, talk, and react to each other. I also enjoyed reading a Black/POC Fantasy book. Being a cis female white reader, I appreciate expanding my consumption to voices and experiences that are not like my own and challenging my assumed cis/whiteness bias. I am really interested in reading more P. Djeli Clark!

My copy did have some typos and weird sentence structure which may be due to the fact is was an ARC.

Who its for?: fantasy readers, fast-paced action, get out of a reading slump, not so hard to think about

Who is it not for?: People who want more complex/epic fantasy, People who think to hard when they read (that can be me sometimes!), people who don't like a little bit of gore.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.
This book is wild fun from the get-go. It just dives straight into the action. It is short and wastes no time on world-building, but you get to pick up so many elements from throughout the narrative that are absolutely engaging and diverting. (I can’t wait to dive back into this world in the future) The book is fast-paced, but it does give the appropriate time to certain moments that need more space. The religious and assassin and science/magic aspects are so fun! I adore complex magical systems, even when there isn’t too much time spent on them and I was intrigued by the setup Clark has for magic and the study of it in this book, it felt kind of Discworld-esque, though without an orangutan.
Eveen, the main character, is so charming. She may be an assassin, but with the book from her perspective, we get to peek behind her curtain. She is funny, a voracious reader, and skilled. Honestly, I loved the characters in this book, even the villains and creeps (though those because they were written well, not because of any nobleness of spirit). There are so many little things that are very funny and kind of meta, without overpowering the story at the heart of the book. The themes of identity, love, and community are present and powerful without taking away from the violence I expected from an assassin story. There are fight scenes and spell-wielding that are fun and scientific and wicked cool. I loved this book for many reasons and had so much fun with it, I read it in one day because I couldn’t bear to drag it out.

This was a unique little story. I had no clue what it was about when I picked it up and had a lot of fun with it. Impressive amount of character development and world-building done in so few pages.

The Dead Cat Tail Assasins is a fun and breezy read. The world they inhabit is new and interesting and I'm curious to find out more about it. I hope more books are in store.

It's always a pleasure to read P. Djèli Clark's book and I'm very happy I got an early access to this one !

It's a shift from your regular hired-assassin tropes, no one falls in love in that one, but the mystery is a thick one to crack.

I really liked Eveen as a main character and I enjoyed the world building and magic system.

It's a short read and I wish we could have had something bigger as to explore the world more, but it was extrememy entertaining.

It was however a bit hard to understand the goddesses at the end.

This was such a fun, short, zombie assassin story that really should be a movie!

In this story, when you die you can choose which gods you serve, and our main character, Eveen chooses the Matrion of Assassins, which means she becomes the undead and can assassinate people - though there are strict rules about how and when they can do so. Eveen takes a job, but recognizes the person she is sent to assassinate, and refuses to go through with it, which is a big no-no.

I thought Eveen was going to be on the run, but she actually goes back to her boss and is like, so this isn’t supposed to happen, how do we fix it. I really appreciated that! She is not afraid to team up with people to fix the problem.

The world building is great. The conversations feel natural, and it doesn’t feel like they are aware of the reader. They are just talking about things they would naturally talk about, but also telling the reader information about the world. And some of the things that seem like fun, quirky facts about the world become plot relevant by the end. The set up, foreshadowing, and sprinkling in of details is great!

I also loved the vivid descriptions in this story. I am someone who doesn't picture things in my head as I read, and that sometimes means I get lost when reading battle scenes. I never felt lost in this book. I might not have been picturing things, but I had a strong sense of what was going on.

I feel like it is the type of story that would work well as a movie. It has action, witty lines, and it is short! Why aren’t novellas turned into movies more often? We generally accept that there needs to be things cut out of novels that become movies, but they shouldn’t have to cut as much story from a novella. It’d be perfect!

It is a zombie assassin story, and it doesn’t shy away from violence, but it also has witty banter going on the whole time, which lightens the tone of the story so it felt more like a fun adventure story.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t love the whole way through the story. In the final scene we have a being from the spirit realm who talks to our main characters, and the dialogue is written in a dialect or accent. So the words aren’t written the way they are in standard English, but rather how they are pronounced. The accent was thick enough that I didn’t understand everything that was said. Our main characters seemed to know what was being said, and I used them for context clues. I understand that it can be more immersive to have a character’s dialogue written this way, but in this book I found it actually taking me out of the story. I had to really slow down and reread a lot to try and figure out what was going on. This is unfortunate because these celestial beings played a major role in the climax of the story, and that’s when I was pulled out of the story. I might try to listen to the audiobook, because that might solve the problem I had with this portion of the book.

I also found it odd that a celestial being, who seems to not pay much attention to humans, uses modern human slang. As much as I felt the world building was thought out, this felt off to me and was never explained.

Our two main characters and their relationship really stole the show. I loved when we had down time with them and they were discussing their lives and trying to get to know each other. Their ending was satisfying and gave me all the feels.

When I heard Djèlí Clark was coming out with a new stand-alone book (novella?) I was immediately on board. Although Dead Cat Tail wasn't quite what I hoped for, it didn't disappoint, either.*

Assassins have become popular anti-heroes in modern fantasy literature, and Eveen's sect is even odder and colder than the norm--the assassins are members of the formerly alive who have been resurrected through magic and their relationship to their goddess.. It is perhaps one of the most interesting use of zombies-excuse me, the undead; zombies is a pejorative--I have yet seen. As with all religions, there's all sorts of constraints around the practicing of the work, and Eveen finds herself in a conundrum when the person she is contracted to kill seems eerily familiar.

The narration is third person, primarily Eveen's perspective. Eveen herself has a decidedly modern youth feel, putting me very much in mind of Gideon the Ninth. Plotting, while slightly less bananas, does get a little dizzying by the end. I would say that Djèlí Clark does a fair job of gradually setting the reader up with the world-building and the constraints that proves so difficult to manage.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Interesting, if somewhat florid, world-building that is well-used in context of the story. Intriguing character arcs and characters wrestling with mission and duty. A straight-forward plot that keeps the pace moving. Solid atmosphere that lends itself to the plot. The majority of characters have shades of brown skin, and it is always nice to see representation in fantasy. On that note, I will mention that Djèlí Clark is one of the few male authors that writes women like people. It's a wonder to behold.

I found it a story that was interesting and very hard to put down. That said, three issues prevent me from an easy 5 star rating. Wording could be tightened up, and quite possibly will be by final edition. I felt like for a matter-of-fact character voice, some of the adjectives seemed excessive, and some of the phrasing needed trimming. Second, a dialect is brought into the story near the end, and ended up being jarring enough that it threw me out of the story. Looking back, I think it would be about the same if someone had reached under a bed and pulled out an AK-47. It was weirdly specific to particular culture we hadn't been exposed to when nothing else in the story was contextually appropriate. Lastly, and most significantly, is the epilogue. While the ending worked (much like Briar Rabbit, you knew some fancy trick was coming), I have ethical problems with the wrap-up. It was an unsettling and harsh end to what was essentially a fairly harmless (but high stakes) story. Summation then: while certainly better than the last book, doesn't reach my favorites.




*while there are assassins, there are no cat tails or cats, dead or otherwise.




Many thanks to NetGalley and Tor for an electronic advanced reader copy. Unsurprisingly, opinions are my own.

Clark is a fantastic author. I have read most of his works and have only a couple left. This short novel was fun and propulsive, not to mention chock full of strong female characters. I enjoyed the reading tremendously. As always, the world building is well done. You can see and feel the world of the assassin’s guild and the characters within. However, I did wish that I got more internal dialogue and thought from the characters. It wasn’t quite as strong as some of his other work.

Clark is fantastic at creating wonderfully diverse and creative worlds, and this book is no different. Set in a sprawling, ancient city, the story follows an undead assassin, revived to serve a goddess, as she finds herself thrown a curveball with her most recent contract. The plot was fast paced and easy to follow, but i found the setting and world building to be more interesting. The characters were interesting, but didn't have a lot of room to grow in such a quick moving story, and while there were a few twists, nothing truly surprising happened. I would like to see more novellas in this setting, as the world is just fascinating.

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a wild ride, and you will not want it to end! Honestly, this could be a whole series. That's my only complaint--that this story is too short!
This book has everything: mystery, adventure, action, magic, assassins, action, mythology, necromancers, action . . .
Eveen the Eviscerator has a calling card and she's only mildly embarrassed to use it. She's dead. Having made a deal with the goddess of knives in life, she now carries out assassinations as an undead amnesic hitwoman. She's great at what she does until a job takes her face-to-face with the past she's not supposed to remember.
If you're a fan of Clark's Dead Djinn universe and Muir's Locked Tomb series, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a must-read!

This was so much fun! I enjoyed the premise, the characters, and the dialogue. The worldbuilding was also very cool and unique, although there were a handful of anachronistic references that pulled me out of the story (zombies and Edgelords??).

For such a short read, it was certainly action-packed. It could have felt repetitive after a while, but Clark really spiced up all the other assassins in a way that made each feel unique. I thought I saw the ending coming, but I got it just wrong enough to feel both surprised and satisfied.

I was provided an ARC of this book via the publisher and Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

This was originally supposed to release in April, however the publication date has moved to August. Not sure if that will impact the contents of the book, but I loved it! This novella is roughly 200 pages of action packed sci-fi/fantasy. Each one if Clark's books mixes a bit of steampunk, science fiction, and fantasy into a unique story that you don't want to put down. The world building is excellent, and even in a short time you come to love the characters!

Eveen is a member of The Dead Cat Tail Assassins', they are a guild of undead assassins governed by contracts and godling laws. When presented with what appears to be a proper contract, Eveen finds herself unable to fulfil the contract which could bring down the wrath of Aeril, the goddess her kind serves on not only herself bur her entire guild.

Eveen and her mark, set out on a mission to figure out how to undo the contract through time and space without destroying the entire city before the sun comes up. Eveen and Sky offset each other like night and day, while using everything at hand to figure out how to circumvent the contract and set things to rights. This had everything I would want from a great story, good humor, engaging plot, interesting characters, and it was a lot of fun!

Tor and P. Djèlí Clark, I fall at your feet once more. P. Djèlí Clark's been a must-read author for some years now, ever since A Dead Djinn in Cairo popped up on NetGalley, so it truly is an honor to be once more accepted to read one of his books. A master of storytelling, his worlds always feel deeply lived in, deeply familiar, deeply glorious, deeply hilarious, deeply emotional, and deeply human.
Though there were some formatting errors (blank pages) it felt more like cliffhangers, and therefore made the read even better!

If this world is ever expanded in to, I'll be coming to the line as early as I can to read!

I have long wanted to try out a P. Djeli Clark book, so when this novella popped up and it had assassins, I couldn’t resist. Eveen is an undead assassin, her continued existence granted by the Matron of Existence. Her past life is wiped and her undead life goes on in exchange for her pledge to complete every contract that she is given. But when the mark looks familiar (hard to do when you have no memories), she gets caught up plot that goes deeper through her city than she ever imagined.

This story was wonderfully paced, the action continually propelling me forward through the whole novella. While I did guess the twist almost immediately, I did not see all the ways he used it in the finale. Overall an enjoyable short read.

Clark once again delivers a fast, readable novella with great action and his trademark worldbuilding skill. "The Dead Cat Tail Assassins" reads (with mild spoilers) like a fantasy version of the movie "Looper," following an assassin with a patchy past as she tries to understand why her latest job has gone so terribly wrong. As in his "Dead Djinn" works, Clark returns to the well of steampunk technology mixed with necromancy, this time in an original setting rather than the alt-history Egypt he previously used. Separating the novella's world from ours gives him more room for twists and turns, but also leaves the worldbuilding details feeling more detached (or perhaps that's just my growing interest in history coming through). Still, it was an entertaining read that sets up and executes (ha! pun intended) its premise, and doesn't pointlessly trail off in service of a sequel. These days a true standalone is hard to find, and that alone would be enough to earn it a solid four stars. Luckily, the book isn't coasting on narrative structure alone and the prose holds up, though not quite enough to earn a fifth.

I read this in a day and loved it. A quick read that is funny, a beautiful representation of black fantasy, and with a few twists and turns that kept me guessing, I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a short romp of a novel that’ll break them out of a reading slump! 4⭐

*Thank you again to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.*