It's Like This, Cat

Fourteen year old Dave Mitchell adopts a stray tomcat from his elderly neighbor Kate partly because he knows it will annoy his father, who has never forgiven the family's last dog for various disasters, and the cat, never given a more particular name than Cat, becomes Dave's excuse to range around his own New York City neighborhood rather than stay cooped up at home. Through Cat, Dave drifts into an unlikely friendship with Tom Ransom, an older, drifting young man his father disapproves of on sight, and Dave spends much of the book quietly siding with Tom's version of things over his father's. He wanders the city with real specificity, the Fulton Fish Market, Coney Island, a trip to see West Side Story with a girl named Mary he is figuring out how to like, while the tension between Dave and his short tempered father simmers under everything, worsened by his mother's asthma and the stress the household's arguments put on her. By the end Dave's father has quietly helped Tom find steady work, Tom announces his engagement to a young woman named Hilda and his decision to enlist in the Army, and Dave, Mary and the rest of the group toast the news, Cat included, over the ordinary business of a summer coming to a close rather than any single dramatic resolution.

Reading it means following an entirely plotless summer through a teenage boy's own restless, observant voice, closer to a diary than a story with a destination, and its loose, episodic pacing was a real departure at the time from Newbery winners built around adventure or history. Readers looking for a clear climax may find it drifts, but its unforced picture of a real New York neighborhood and a father and son learning to talk to each other still reads as honest rather than dated.