Salsa! Lolcats! Revolution!

“The Cat King of Havana” by Tom Crosshill is an edge-of-your-seat tale of the mean streets of Havana — full of adventurous salsa dancing, dangerous romance, and cats.

Lolcats, specifically.

On this website:

Find out more about the book, learn to dance salsa, or discover why this site is called Catotrope.com (by watching the finest cat videos known to mankind!)

“The Cat King of Havana” by Tom Crosshill is an edge-of-your-seat tale of the mean streets of Havana — full of adventurous salsa dancing, dangerous romance, and cats.

Lolcats, specifically.

On this website:

Find out more about the book, learn to dance salsa, or or discover why this site is called Catotrope.com (by watching the finest cat videos known to mankind!)

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About the Book

Rick Gutierrez is . . . the Cat King of Havana! A cat video tycoon turned salsa dancer extraordinaire, he’ll take Cuba by storm, romance the girl of his dreams, and ignite a lolcat revolution!

At least that’s the plan.

His girlfriend dumps Rick on his sixteenth birthday. His crime? Uploading cat videos from his bedroom when he should be out experiencing the real world. Known as “The Last Catbender” online—and as “That Cat Guy” at school—Rick isn’t cool and he knows it. It’s time for a change.

So Rick joins a salsa class . . . because of a girl. Ana Cabrera is smart, friendly, and smooth on the dance floor. Rick might be half-Cuban, but he dances like a drunk hippo. Desperate to impress Ana, he invites her to spend the summer in Havana. The official reason: learning to dance. The hidden agenda: romance under the palm trees.

Except Cuba isn’t all sun, dance, and music. There’s a darker side to the island. As Rick and Ana meet his family and investigate the reason why his mother left Cuba decades ago, they learn that politics isn’t just something that happens to other people. And when they find romance, it’s got sharp edges.

Rick Gutierrez is . . . the Cat King of Havana! A cat video tycoon turned salsa dancer extraordinaire, he’ll take Cuba by storm, romance the girl of his dreams, and ignite a lolcat revolution!

At least that’s the plan.

Read an excerpt from “The Cat King of Havana”

Praise for “The Cat King of Havana”

A Junior Library Guild Selection

Crosshill’s big-hearted novel shines.

— Publishers Weekly

Crosshill shares the best of Cuba, bringing it alive for readers with beautiful and vibrant descriptions of salsa and honest, often funny commentary. Cat King also offers a fresh portrayal of young romance, a welcome dose of reality for geeks hoping to get the girl.

— E. C. MyersAndre Norton Award-winning YA author

The Cat King of Havana navigates through complex layers of belonging with glorious goofiness.

— William AlexanderNational Book Award-winning author of Goblin Secrets

Salsa! LOLcats! Political prisoners! It’s impossible not to get swept up in the dizzying rush of this book. Rick Gutiérrez is the kind of narrator you can’t help but like (even when he’s being a douche), and The Cat King of Havana balances the sharply funny with the beautifully bittersweet in its explorations of identity, family, love, and the complexities of Cuba.

— Julia RiosAward-winning editor of Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

Crosshill deftly captures those odd and beautiful moments at the intersections of culture and race and gender and class; the mortification of being a raw beginner at something you already know you love and already doubt you’ll ever be any good at; the unexpected peace of trying as hard as you can and still not getting what you want (which maybe never mattered anyway)–I loved this layered, smart, hilarious novel.

— Alaya Dawn JohnsonNorton- and Nebula-Award winning author of The Summer Prince

“The Cat King of Havana” on goodreads

Learn Salsa with “The Cat King of Havana”

Author Tom Crosshill recently spent a year in Havana studying dance at the Instituto Superior de Arte. While there, he shot a series of salsa videos at various locations featured in “The Cat King of Havana”.

To learn a few basic steps, watch the videos below! More will be posted soon!

Basic Step

Paseala

Advanced Salsa

Exhibela

Guapea

Rumba

“The Cat King of Havana” on Epic Reads

The Best Cat Videos Known to Mankind

Or: Why Catotrope?

Rick Gutierrez, the protagonist of “The Cat King of Havana”, is a cat video tycoon. His site catotrope.com is a one-stop lolcat destination.

For this reason, one of the most difficult parts of writing the book was the research. Author Tom Crosshill spent hundreds of hours selflessly watching cat videos all across the internet to ground catotrope.com in the real world. Here are a few of his favorites.

Note: We didn’t create these videos; all the rights to the videos belong to their respective owners.

Creepy Cat

Big Box and Maru

Lazy Cat

The OMG Cat

Roomba Cat

Got your own favorites? Share them with Tom on Twitter!

About the Author

Tom Crosshill is an award-winning author, public speaker, and salsa teacher.

Originally from Latvia, Tom moved to the US as a teen and now lives wherever his adventures take him. A black belt in aikido, he has operated a nuclear reactor, worked on Wall Street, and toiled in a Japanese zinc mine, among other things.

On a chance trip to Havana, Tom fell in love with salsa. After years of study with the world’s top dancers and several long stays in Cuba, he wrote “The Cat King of Havana”.

Tom’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award (thrice), the Latvian Literature Award and the WSFA Small Press Award. He has won the ESFS Award for Best Author and the Writers of the Future Award. In 2013, he was a resident at the world-famous International Writing Program at the University of Iowa — where he started “The Cat King of Havana”. To find out more about Tom’s fiction — and to read some of his short stories — visit his website.

Photo by Spigana