Kitty in High School

I really enjoyed revisiting this series which I loved so much as a preteen, even though as an adult I found myself wishing each book had been longer! This, the fourth book in the series, opens shortly before Kitty and her best friends Eileen and Margaret Mary start high school at St. Joan's Academy in St. Paul. The previous book, 'Kitty in the Summer,' took place the summer before fifth grade, and now our shero and her friends are a lot more grown-up. The opening of many area schools has been delayed because of an outbreak of polio, so the girls have been staying with Eileen's parents by the lake until it's safe to go back to the city. Along with excitement over starting high school and taking on new adult responsibilities such as dating and dancing comes nervousness and fear over having to learn the rules of a whole new school, navigate new classes such as Latin and geometry, balance a new friendship with her tried and true old friendships, and figure out the rules of finding a boyfriend and keeping him. Through her early days of ninth grade, Kitty not only learns a lot about herself but also about the value of true friendships and just being yourself to attract the right kind of boys. As always in this series, I loved all of the touches of another era, such as riding the streetcar to school, feeling excited over watching a test pattern on TV, going away when a polio epidemic strikes, in an era before life-saving vaccines, Kitty's shock over how her new friend Mimi has a mother who works and a father who does chores and cooks, a root beer stand, Catholic schools taught entirely by fully habited nuns, people with names like Skip, Buzz, Dickie, and Fluffy, and the kinds of things teenagers did for fun in the post-WWII era. (I've also never heard of any other school holding its prom in the fall instead of near the end of the year!) I only wish Ms. Delton had written more books in this series and not ended after only four!