The Fire Cat: A Great Preview to Jenny and the Cat Club

When I was a little girl, some of my favorite books were by Esther Averill. I just adored the "Jenny and the Cat Club" series and the one book that grabbed my attention and kept it was The Hotel Cat. When my daughter started reading, I really wanted to introduce her to Jenny and her friends.

However, when I took a look at those books, the vocabulary and sentence structure was on a higher level than what I felt was appropriate for my then 4 year old. She really needed a beginning reader, but not necessarily something so simplistic as Hop On Pop.

The following week, when I was browsing at a local bookstore, I came across Esther Averill's The Fire Cat in a display with other "I Can Read" books and I was delighted to find that this book was rated Level 1! Level 1 designates "short simple stories for the early reader" and that was exactly where my daughter who was self-taught using the whole word method was in her reading journey.

The Fire Cat tells the story of Pickles who is a yellow cat with black spots. Pickles has very big paws and was therefore meant to do big things. However, Pickles was a very young cat and as youngsters of all types are wont to do, Pickles often made bad decisions. Pickles was, in a word, a bully. He picked on smaller cats and didn't have any cat friends.

In the first section of the book, "Pickles", Mrs. Goodkind attempted to adopt Pickles but it didn't work out well. He got himself stuck in a tree and ended up moving to the firehouse.

The second section, "The Fire Cat", tells us how Pickles wanted to be a fire cat but becoming a fire cat requires a lot of hard work. He needed to learn about sliding down poles, jumping on the fire truck, sitting on the seat and helping with the hose.

Finally, in the third part ("The Old Tree"), Pickles had to learn how to be a friend to other cats. He ends up revisiting the tree that he was stuck in back in the first section and helps to save the day.

While the other cat club stories seem to be aimed at a female audience as girls are more likely to enjoy stories about anthromorphic cats, The Fire Cat is appropriate for young boys as well. There is less emphasis on the relationships between the cats and more on Pickles' journey to self-awareness and maturity.

Most of the words in The Fire Cat are in the one to two syllable range. There are a few three syllable words but they are easy to sound out and should be recognizable to younger readers once they do so. The hardest words I came across were "telephone", "wonderful" and "beginning". The majority of the words are repeated multiple times and it reminded me of a quote I read by Arnold Lobel where he said that the limited vocabulary in early reader books is why the characters all sound rather neurotic.

The Fire Cat has a few simplistic illustrations where it is easy to see that Pickles is a yellow cat with black spots. Overall, these illustrations are not remarkable and I did not think they either added to or detracted from the story.

After reading this book, my daughter re-read it multiple times. I wish I had purchased a hardback copy because the pages are about ready to fall out of our paperback version. Six months ago, she was ready for her own copy of Jenny and the Cat Club which has been a huge hit here. But, she's still not ready to give up on The Fire Cat. Yesterday, she read it to her year old sister. I think we may have a second Jenny and the Cat Club fan in our midst!