Your Best Friend, Kate

by Pat Brisson, Rick Brown (Illustrator)

Kate's letters to her best friend back home chart her family's trip through the South and back up through Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and reveal her true affection for her brother with whom she is always fighting.

Genres: Picture Books

32 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1989

About the author

I have been writing picture books and easy-to-read chapter books for the last twenty years. My first YA, The Best and Hardest Thing, a novel in verse, will be coming out in May 2010.

I am a former elementary school teacher, school librarian and reference librarian in a public library. I now write full-time and do author visits to schools.

My husband and I have four grown sons. We live in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.
Our last name has a short "i" sound and rhymes with "listen".

Reviews

[Gizelle]

“You Best Friend, Kate” is a story that contains the letters Kate writes to her best friend, Lucy, about her four week vacation throughout the Northeastern states of the United States. She talks about everything she does in every state she stops at. Throughout her trip, she has difficulties with her brother by fighting, bickering, and teasing. This story can be a realistic fiction because its events that could have happened to someone and its describing events that could have actually occurred to someone. Making this book an easy, relatable story for kids.
The tone that the author uses makes it very fun and exciting to read, since the author wrote this book using the mind of a young adult. She included humor, sarcasm, and other details that young adults would say to their best friends through letters. The letter format makes the reader connect on a more personal level, as if the letter was meant to them. Making it seem like Kate was actually writing to the reader and I personally love stories like this because of the personal connection.