Da Vinci’s Cat
- by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
- Novel
- Science Fiction
- Children
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- Da Vinci’s Cat by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Greenwillow Books, May 2021) [print · e-book].
As a hostage to Pope Julius II in 1511 Rome, 11-year-old Federico is lonely until he receives a visit from a tawny cat, an art collector from the 20th century, and an 11-year-old kid named Bee from the 21st century.
—Michael Main
All we need is to get Raphael to draw me and make sure he signs it.
Tags
(14)
- Time Periods
- Early Modern History (AD 1454 to 1600): Federico’s time, AD 1511
- Circa AD 1900 to 1929: Herbert’s time, offstage only: I come from hundreds of years away, from the year 1928.
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: Bee’s time, circa 2021
- Timeline Models
- Branch-and-Return Timeline: The book makes an attempt at a causal loop that doesn’t quite mesh. Herbert tells Federico that he bought the wardrobe in Mantua in the shape of a trunk and then remade it into a wardrobe himself. So Federico has the wardrobe remade into a trunk and shipped to Mantua for Federico to find. The problem is that the wardrobe Herbert found was not quite the same one that Federico left for him, because Herbert found a wardrobe containing an unsigned portrait, while in the end, Federico left a wardrobe a signed portrait. This suggests that there are additional timelines that are not part of the Da Vinci Cat narrative; those timelines might result in no causal loops or in a multi-timeline causal loop. Up in the ITTDB Citadel, we spent some time trying to put together a consistent set of timelines that worked in one of those manners, but the possibilities were too numerous to yield a definitive answer. In the end, we decided that some kind of branching timelines are probably involved, but we couldn't say much more than that.
- Time Travel Methods
- Themes
- Antiques or Ancient Artifacts for Fun and Profit: Herbert deals in Renaissance art.
- Fix Your Time Travel Screw-Up!: Bee manages to kill off Federico and Michelangelo in 1511.
- Real-World Tags
- Donato Bramante
- Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua
- Leonardo da Vinci: Offstage only: Leonardo Da Vinci had designed the closet. How remarkable.
- Michelangelo
- Pope Julius II
- Raphael
- Sistine Chapel
Variants
(2)
- Da Vinci’s Cat by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Greenwillow Books, May 2021) [print · e-book].
- audio reading.
Da Vinci’s Cat by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Greenwillow Books, May 2021) [audio reading].
Indexer Notes
(1)
- Timelines—The story suggests multiple timelines, some of which—such as a timeline where Raphael draws an unsigned portrait—are not part of the narrative.