Caterpillar Summer

When the family's summer arrangements go awry, Cat and Chicken's mother sends them to North Carolina to stay with her parents whom the kids have never met. Clearly there is some kind of estrangement between daughter and parents. Cat struggles to connect with her grandfather and tries to figure out

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what happened between him and Mom.

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Sweet book about being the reliable one in a family -- the kid who takes care of everything when one parent is worked and the other has passed and your younger brother is slightly neurodivergent. Love how Cat's estranged grandparents manage to slip into her life slowly and take the weight off

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without forcing confrontations or moving too fast. It's also a good book about a magical escape of a place and friendships and sharks and fishing.

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A simple, yet heart warming story of a young girl growing up over the summer. Cat isn't really fond of her role of being guardian to Chicken her autistic younger brother. Since the death of her father she had to be the glue that keeps everything together especially with her mom always working. Cat

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barely has time to be a kid and sometimes that frustration shows between her interaction with Chicken. Over the course of the book we do get valuable insights of her mother's relationship to her parents and the prioritization of work over family can have detrimental long term effects. While these things are important, I do wish more time was spent with the children on the island and Cat biracial identity in regards to discrimination and hair. These two things in particular was presented in a rushed, one-dimensional way and I'm afraid younger readers might not fully get the point it is trying to established. I would have rated the book much higher, but I wasn't that interested in the Grandparents story-line.

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