Kitty and the Moonlight Rescue
Cat power!
It is Snarf time once again.
Hope you’re all doing well with the end of school/start of summer madness. I’m still not used to how you’re supposed to plan for all of this stuff eight months out.
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Now onto…
The Series: Kitty
The Author: Paula Harrison
The Illustrator: Jenny Løvlie
Length/Picture Density: Around 120 pages, illustrations on most spreads, sometimes taking up most of the page.
Series Length: Ten books at the time of writing, but Harrison and Løvlie are churning these out at a rate of three per year (I have not read all of them).
I am especially charmed by this series, and for a while I didn’t really know why. It’s fun and well written, but so are many other series. I believe I’ve narrowed down what’s working for me with these into two main points.
First, I really enjoy this series’ take on wish fulfillment. Wish fulfillment is how I broadly categorize a core appeal of many (most? all?) of the books I’ve written about. Stories let you live vicariously through a wizard of destiny, meet unicorns, go on treasure hunts, discover lost secrets. The Kitty books’ wish fulfillment is around something closer to home for many kids: cat power.
Kitty and her mom both have an innate ability to speak to cats and take on many of their physical abilities: big leaps, great balance, seeing in the dark, hearing faint noises, that kind of thing. She doesn’t transform, have retractable claws, or anything like that, she’s just a kid with cat power. All of her adventures happen at night, with a cast of neighborhood cats looped in on the action.
Side note: books about kids going on solo adventures have to deal with the parents somehow, hence the tendency to bump them off in the first few pages. Because Kitty’s mom has all the same powers, and is often off on her own nocturnal rescue missions, going out on nighttime adventures for this family is something akin to learning to swim for a normal family (it’s possible that I am writing this at Leo’s swim class).
That set up allows Kitty to have her jaunts without any guilt or secrecy, while keeping her parents out of the picture outside of beginnings and codas.
The other aspect of this series that really wins me over is the illustrations. They’re mostly done in a Halloween pallet (especially the first two) — everything is in shades of orange, black, and white. They pop in a way that gets me every time. The style, which mixes in both charcoal and ink textures, works really well for all the nighttime scenes. They take these fun little cat stories and make them feel like a vivid dream.
I’d be curious to hear if any of you feel the same way on these — it can be hard to tell sometimes if a work of art is special to a broad group, or mostly just to you.
All that said, the plots can get a little clunky sometimes. Nothing egregious, just the occasional awkwardly convenient resolution or unsatisfying side path. There’s enough tension to keep you reading, but the narratives aren’t the strongest aspect of the books.
Where the stories do deliver is in how Kitty gets to know many neighborhood cats through her adventures, and becomes part of the cat community. Once the action starts, there are little to no humans, other than the protagonist.
There are bad guys in some of them, but they are always at least partly redeemed by the end. Not so much bad guys, I suppose, as animals doing bad things. That approach fits better with the overall ethos of these.
I imagine this would be a good series for kids still getting their feet wet with chapter books, but should hold plenty of interest at older ages as well.
What are you reading this summer? (I wrote that meaning the kid stuff, but I’ll take grown-up recommendations as well.) Let me know with a reply or comment if you’ve come across anything good.