Hate that cat by Sharon Creech
Bloomsbury, ISBN 9780
747599807. 2009.
(Ages 8-12) Following the success of
Love that dog,
Creech has developed another story in verse form,
set after Sky's death. Jack is in his old teacher's class again and
Miss
Stretchberry who loves poetry, asks the students to create a poem after
telling
them about metaphors and imagery and alliteration and onomatopoeia
through the
poems they read in class. Each of these words is modeled in the words
Jack puts
down on the page. He has an uneasy relationship with his Uncle Bill, a
poetry
teacher at a college, who insists that poems must rhyme and that what
Jack is
writing is not poetry.
But Jack persists. He tells the reader about
some of the poems they read in class, TheRed Wheelbarrow by
William Carlos
Williams, The Eagle by Alfred Lord
Tennyson and The Bells by Edgar Allan
Poe, and these are emulated by Jack throughout the novel. As the story
progresses, Jack tells how he hates cats, and is shocked when his
teacher
brings in her kittens. Little by little Jack's attitude to cats changes
as he
has more to do with the kittens and when his parents give him a kitten
for
Christmas, he is happy. A cloud appears however when the door is left
open and
the kitten escapes, only to be returned by the old stray who lives in
the
neighbourhood.
A delightful story, imbued with some well
known and not so well known poems, this little book will be a hit with
primary
teachers looking for a model to use with their students. Students will
easily
fall for Jack and his dislike of cats and grow with him as he finds
that they
are not so bad after all. The modeling of the styles of poetry of
Myers,
Williams, Poe and Tennyson is a lovely touch, making their poetry more
accessible to the young audience but also giving a neat way of teaching
poetry
in the middle primary to lower secondary classroom.
The last 20 pages of the book are filled with
the poems talked of, including some by Jack, and the last 4 pages has a
list of
the poetry books kept in Miss Stretchberry's classroom. Both make a
most useful
addition to the book.
Fran Knight