Kitty from the Start

Kitty #1

by Judy Delton

Kitty moves to a new neighborhood and eventually makes a successful transition into her new third grade.

141 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 1987

About the author

Born on May 6th in St. Paul, Minnesota, Judy Delton lived in her hometown for most of her life. She wrote more than one hundred books for children, including the popular Pee Wee Scouts series, which sold more than seven million copies. Her writing was often compared to Beverly Cleary or Carolyn Haywood for her ability to capture the essence of childhood.

For many years, Ms. Delton taught writing classes in her home. Today, those writers are having their own books published and remember her forthright instruction and critique with appreciation. Many writers have benefited from her handbook, The 29 Most Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

Ms. Delton had four children and decided to quit teaching so she could stay home and raise them. Writing prolifically was her way of supporting her family. She died very suddenly of a blood infection in December of 2001. Her legions of friends and all those she taught were greatly saddened.

Reviews

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm. . . I had decided to reread this book as it was a book I remembered loving when I was in second grade. Upon a second reading, I realized that this book was dripping in Catholic doctrine! Ha! My second grade self did not pick up on that at all. This is a tale of doing what is right, to say the least.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kitty! I loved it. I only knew Judy Delton from PeeWee Scouts, which were lame even to me as a small kid, but Judy Delton can write when she's not trying to reinvent coeducational scouting for the modern kids of the '80s. I'm assuming that Kitty is semi-autobiographical. I would be flabbergasted if Kitty was not semi-autobiographical.

Kitty is an innocent young girl smack in the middle of third grade when she learns that, through no fault of her own, her family must move from sort of the Mac-Groveland area of St. Paul to the Midway area and she will be attending the rest of third grade in a basically identical but completely different Catholic school six blocks from her new house, which is the same as moving to New Zealand, socially. No one even considers that Kitty could take the streetcar and finish out her year at her old school. There's a war on and presumably letting a child ride a streetcar isn't part of the war effort, or her family doesn't have the budget for a child to ride the streetcar, but they should, because they only have one child. Kitty is filled with trepidation about her new school. Her uniform will take several weeks to come in, so she has to wear her civilian clothes and stand out even more. She knows no one. Thankfully, two girls are nice to her and invite her to their houses after school. (I forgot their names. I'm calling them Mary Ruth and Cathleen.). Kitty's new friends are the extremes of Catholic childhood: Mary Ruth is shocked that Kitty doesn't attend mass every morning before school; Mary Ruth lives in a dank, multi-generational household with a careworn mother and holy water fonts all over the place. Cathleen wants to play confession, which involves making up sins and hitting each other with pillows. Kitty is concerned that this is a big sin but she wants to fit in and it's fun. Cathleen's mother is *gasp* a convert, and the whole family is rather lax about Catholicism, in their clean and fancy house. Kitty manages to form a best friend circle with Mary Ruth and Cathleen and they get into a pickle by seeing a Betty Grable movie with legs which might be banned by the Catholic Decency Squadron. Cathleen is fascinated by the mushy stuff, and Mary Ruth leaves in the middle of the movie and Kitty has to go sit with her in the lobby and not have fun. Then there's an incident where the nun needs to leave for a few weeks and the class gets a lay teacher, which Kitty thinks means that the teacher will be a prone invalid. This book is a sweet, funny, real, heckin' autobiographical story of growing up in St. Paul in the '40s. The first of many in this series. I appreciated it.

[MQR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really liked this when I was younger, read a couple more but can't recall which ones.

[Cws]

JAR4-Del

[Elisabeth Petty]

This is a fun series about a girl named Kitty who starts at a brand new school and tries to fit in and find friends. It's a kids book, but a good one.