I also found this book more humorous than Blue Willow. There is a warm family dynamic and an especially amusing father (though I thought he took the Santa Claus thing a bit too far-with guns and everything). That’s not to say that I regard it on the same level with those, it’s just similar.
Considering the time period and some of the mischief the two girls (sisters in this case) get into, it reminds me a little of the early Betsy- Tacy books. Automobiles are still fairly new but they do have a telephone and plan on getting electricity soon. I would say that it takes place around the early twentieth century. It almost reads as though the author might be drawing on her own childhood memories, though I have no idea at all if this is true. It is still a very charming little read, and I imagine I would’ve liked it a lot when I was younger (as I am older, I found it a little tedious at times). And the lessons Kate learned about the world and its ways, that sense and nonsense both have their part in happiness, will be understood by small girls the whole world over.This is really more of a collection of chronological vignettes then book with a progressing plot. Doris Gates knows what it feels like to have sand in one's shoes, and to hear the gulls sweep and cry above the fishing boats. "She gives me a pain." And there was Vic's brother Leo who didn't have much sense the way Kate meant it and yet Kate loved him almost as much as Vic did. "Do you envy Beverly Jean?" Kate asked him after the first miserable day of school. There were Nora and Christopher Cline-they didn't have a lick of sense, especially Nora, but it was Nora who told Kate her very first secret. Yet there were other people in the small seaside town who seemed to have other ideas about sense and about cuteness too.
You might even get into the movies! But as an angular red-headed freckle-faced orphan couldn't possibly be considered cute, sensibleness was the only alternative. In this world, thought Kate, if you were cute and pretty nothing was expected of you but that. When Kate Summers came to live with the Tuttles as a "family helper" she had quite made up her mind that good sense was her portion.
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