Review: Last Dance at the Kitten Club, by Noah J.D. Chinn

Last Dance at the Kitten Club
Noah J.D. Chinn
370 pages
Release: November 11, 2024
ISBN 9781990411212
Publisher: Noah Chinn Books

Noah Chinn is a Canadian author living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of 12 books ranging across a variety of genres. His work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Knights at the Dinner Table, and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.

Last Dance at the Kitten Club is part of the Living, Laughing, and Loving Abroad series which presently encompasses two books, the other being The Professional Tourist.

First, the marketing blurb:

London, in a time before streaming services changed TV, Guitar Hero was at the peak of popularity, and bootleg DVDs were sold on street corners.

Abbey’s not a bad writer, but she’s a terrible journalist. Forced to work at a small bookstore after losing her job, she decides to work on a personal project: recreating a story about 1920s Chicago told by her late grandfather—a story that may or may not be true.

Only her co-worker Finn is frustratingly directionless (even if he is attractive), strangers are running pub quizzes in her store, her roommate is going on tour with her band, and one of her customers might be a psychopath.

Oh, and the bookstore is located above a sex shop. Perfect.

People tell Abbey she needs to lighten up, but how can she when the world is so darn annoying? Can’t a girl just write in peace?

Marketed as a romantic comedy, there is an element of the fantastic to the story, a bit of mystery, suspense, and even history for good measure. And therein lies the problem for this reader, in that it’s almost as though Chinn’s customary focused precision as a storyteller wanders in this novel, trying to cast a broad net to snag potential reader demographics.

Having said that, the characters are quite well-drawn, and it is Chinn’s ability to create such characters which is the strength of this story, that and his remarkable wit. There are timeline shifts, deftly handled through chapter breaks, and eventually those seemingly disparate timelines make sense and coalesce into a satisfactory whole. The plot and pacing, however, did wander a bit, and sometimes seemed a bit pointless, diluting focus and tension. But I quibble.

Last Dance at the Kitten Club isn’t deep literature. It’s not the genesis of epiphanies or lingering memories. What the novel does give the reader is just a few hours of pure escapism, no pretension, asks nothing of you. And these days, there’s something to be said for novels of this sort. This Canadian-written novel might just rescue a few people from running screaming into the night, and instead make them comfortable couch potatoes snorfing Canadian-made potato chips.