It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville

First published: 1963; illustrated

Type of work: Domestic realism

Themes: Coming-of-age, family, and friendship

Time of work: The 1960’s

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Dave Mitchell, a fourteen-year-old New York boy who chooses a cat for his pet
• Mr. Mitchell, his father, a talkative lawyer who is often irritated by his son’s actions
• Mrs. Mitchell, a thin, shy woman who frequently has asthma attacks
• Aunt Kate, an elderly neighbor whom the kids call Crazy Kate the Cat Woman because she has many stray cats living with her
• Tom Ransom, a troubled nineteen-year-old friend
• Nick, a friend who lives in Dave’s neighborhood
• Mary, a girl Dave meets at Coney Island, who has parents Dave finds to be very different from his own

The Story

When Aunt Kate, Dave Mitchell’s independent and eccentric neighbor, gives him a big tiger-striped tomcat, Dave realizes the animal will set off another dispute with his father. Dave’s father constantly reminds him that a dog is the pet a fourteen-year-old boy should have, but in the middle of New York City, a dog does not seem to fit into the surroundings, so Dave brings home Cat, and the events of this contemporary coming-of-age novel begin.

It’s Like This, Cat proceeds at a pleasant pace through the realistic daily events in the life of a big-city boy who lives with his lawyer father and shy, asthmatic mother in an apartment. Cat manages to fit into Dave’s life easily and becomes his roommate, confidant, and almost constant companion. Because of Cat, Dave makes a new friend, Tom Ransom, a nineteen-year-old boy who helps him rescue his pet when Cat becomes accidentally locked in a storage cage in a nearby building. At this time, Dave does not realize that Tom is involved in a prank robbery at the building, but later Tom tells him about it. Dave enlists his father’s help for Tom, and Tom soon becomes a family friend.

Dave also has a friend, Nick, and the boys spend time doing homework, playing chess, listening to records, and riding bikes on the New York streets. Their playgrounds provide the reader with city views from Third Avenue to Central Park to Coney Island. The boys are best friends; they do not fight much because “sidewalks are uncomfortable for fighting,” but life changes when on a visit to Coney Island (with Cat along in Dave’s basket), they meet three girls, and Nick’s interest in girls becomes different from Dave’s. As Dave’s friendship with Nick wanes, his friendship with Tom becomes more important. When he learns more about Tom, whose father has deserted him and who is having problems with New York University and his job, Dave sees his own father through different eyes. Mr. Mitchell offers Tom advice and help with a better job, and Dave begins to realize that much of his father’s shouting and sputtering at him are signs of concern. Also, father and son notice that their arguments provoke Mrs. Mitchell’s asthma attacks and agree to try to limit their confrontations.

At a record shop, Dave meets Mary, one of the girls he met at Coney Island, and remembers that she was the nice one. They arrange several outings, and Dave thinks of her as different from other girls. Her intellectual parents, who show little concern for her, also add to his growing feelings of understanding of his own parents. The novel reaches no dramatic climax, as the lives of all of the characters continue at much the same pace, but when Tom comes to tell the Mitchell family that he is leaving to join the army, he points out to Dave that he and his father are always bickering because they are so much alike. Dave accepts this statement and gives it thought. He has reached a milestone in the process of growing up, and his father has accepted Cat as important to the family.

Context

It’s Like This, Cat was Emily Cheney Neville’s first novel and was awarded the Newbery Medal for 1964 and the Nancy Bloch Memorial Award. The book grew from short stories to a novel in the period of two years that Neville worked on it.

The novel differed from the many boy-and-his-dog books with country settings that were popular with adolescent readers for many years and filled a void in fictional writing directed especially toward young adolescent boys. It offered a high-interest, easily read text with contemporary characters and a big-city setting. At the time Neville was writing it, she was living with her husband, five children, two dogs, and a cat in an apartment in New York City, and the setting of the book reflects her awareness of the details of this life-style. The dialogue is chatty and realistic, and most readers at the time easily related to the events in the day-to-day lives of Dave Mitchell, the young protagonist, and his family and friends.

One minor character in It’s Like This, Cat is Ben Alstein, a young Jewish boy, and it is with Ben that Dave begins to learn about Jewish customs. Neville uses the theme of a Jewish-Gentile friendship in Berries Goodman (1965), her second novel. Berries Goodman touches the subject of adult prejudices with Neville’s same style of light conversation and humor. It received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1966. These novels were followed by The Seventeenth-Street Gang (1966), Traveler from a Small Kingdom (1968), and Fogarty (1969).