I picked up my daughter at the library after work tonight. She is
spending one day a week there during the summer months helping out
with shelving books, story hour and the young adult book group the
librarian is trying to garner interest in. I got chatting with the
librarian, a very nice woman with virtually no knowledge of the kids
market in books or even what young folks like to read. Of course,
being the type that will recommend books to anyone who even remotely
looks interested, I left her with a list of decent fiction that kids
ages 10-14 might enjoy reading. No more “MaryKate and Ashley go to
Hawaii” for this crowd!

One of the books I recommended is Fox’s “One-Eyed Cat.” It’s a
Newberry Honor book, one of the few lit awards that actually seems to
award good writing and not good publishing. The story is fairly
simple. A young boy has a father who’s a preacher and a mother crippled with
rheumatoid arthritis. His dashing Uncle comes to visit for his
birthday and brings him a hunting rifle which his father promptly
confiscates and banishes to the attic. Curiosity takes over and the
boy sneaks up to the attic at night, gets the gun and goes out to do a
little target practice. He’s startled by a noise, reacts and shoots
something. Later, he sees a cat with its eye shot out wandering the
neighborhood and realizes he was the one that shot it.

That is a very bald precis of the plot. The father is well portrayed
as a heartbroken man with a sick wife struggling to care for her and
his son. The mother is realistically depicted without being
melodramatic about her pain or illness. And the young boy finds a
friend in an old man down the road who takes in the cat and nurses it
back to health. When I read the back cover, I worried that here was
yet another anti-hunting novel along the lines of Bambi–something
not well thought of in my family of avid hunters–but really it
turns into more a tale of responsibility and consequences, guilt and
repentance than anything else. And it reads really well. Definitely a
must read for my daughter.