Kit Learns a Lesson: A School Story (American Girl Collection)

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant. Simultaneous.

Grade 2-4-Set in Cincinnati, OH, during the Great Depression, these books introduce fourth-grade Kit. In Meet Kit, her father must close his car dealership and join the large number of unemployed. In an effort to make ends meet, her mother takes in boarders; Mrs. Howard and her son Stirling settle into Kit's newly redecorated bedroom, while the girl makes the best of her new space in the attic. In Kit Learns a Lesson, her older brother gets a job rather than attend college, and Kit helps her mother clean. Additional boarders have moved in and there is more work than ever. When a classmate's taunts lead to an altercation, Stirling, Kit, and her best friend are punished. They must deliver food collected by the students to the local soup kitchen, and Kit is shocked to see her father on line for lunch. Still, this is a somewhat idealized portrayal of the Depression. Full-page color illustrations and spot art appear throughout. Photos, reproductions, and explanations of the period follow in each of these transitional chapter books.
Debbie Feulner, Northwest Middle School, Greensboro, NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 3-5. The year is 1934 and the name is Kit Kittredge, the newest character in the popular American Girls series. In Meet Kit , she's pounding out a newspaper on the typewriter in her room and longing for some news fit to print. As the Great Depression comes closer to home, news pours in: first, Mrs. Howard and her son come to stay with Kit's family when Mr. Howard leaves for Chicago to find work. Then Dad loses his job and Mother takes in boarders to make ends meet. Kit Learns a Lesson deals with the effects of the Depression on the household and on the community at large. The last section of each book fills in social history of the period, with clearly written texts and black-and-white photographs. Full-color paintings by Walter Rane illustrate the texts. Two short, fast-moving, and involving stories in the tradition of the series. Carolyn Phelan
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