Caterpillar Summer
By: Gillian McDunn / Narrated By: Cassandra Lee Morris
Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
As it was my pick for our little audiobook club, I held my breath… until I let out gasps of surprise and delight!
Seriously, when it’s my turn to pick the audiobook for our little club, I’m a total mess (Excess cortisol, anyone?) cuz, tho’ we’ve always soothed each other by saying: It’s NEVER anyone’s fault if a book is bad, lame, atrocious? Nope, each of us takes it so hard if a book winds up falling short of the mark. Plus, as y’all know, I’m just plain a spaz.
So each time one of the characters in this audiobook, Caterpillar Summer, wound up all flawed and human-like? I was all spastic that my mom and my sister would find it to be an obnoxious and oh so wearing Listen.
Ahhhh, but then the story started unfolding and the characters were hit with the not-planned-for. And they grow into themselves.
Cat is just a kid, one who’s waaaay older than her years cuz, see, she has a little brother who goes by “Chicken” who’s kinda sorta sensitive, is bothered by that which is not routine, who is verrrrry sensitive to the feel of a shirt tag on his skin. Who has meltdowns. Who runs away.
And it’s Cat who has been given sole responsibility for him as Mom works very, very hard to keep things afloat since Dad died. Cat would dearly love to join in on an ice cream parlor run with girls her age, but nope. Chicken is there, with all his wonderful talk of sharks, with all of his wonderful hugs. With all of his sudden Disappearing Acts. It might be too much, but Cat is strong, and she knows Chicken like nobody else.
When a trip to the South goes awry, when a longtime friend of Cat’s and her family has to go to India for a funeral and to visit family, there’s no choice but for Cat and Chicken to stay with Mom’s parents as Mom works, in a different city, away from them. There’s been a rift spanning many, many years between Mom and her folks, and this is the first Cat and Chicken have ever really heard of a Grandma and Grandpa (And they’ll start by using first names because, really: ARE they a Grandma and Grandpa?).
When they get to the little town where their grandparents live is where the magic in the story truly starts happening, and believe me when I tell you that it’s honest to goodness, flat out simply lovely magic. At first, only Grandma seems to want them there, but Cat kinda sorta starts insinuating herself into Grandpa’s life and, though she starts by believing the worst of him when things don’t go in a set way, she comes to find that Grandpa’s been slowly looking forward to his special time with her.
Then too, Cat runs into the town bully, a young boy who’s been bullied himself by mean brothers. Then too, Cat meets a girl and discovers what having a friend is like. Because Grandma has a special way with Chicken, and because that means Cat now finds herself at loose ends for periods of time, she can go off on her Mom’s old bicycle and… Just Be A Kid.
Cassandra Lee Morris is a spot on narrator as revelations are slowly made (What, exactly, happened between Mom and her folks?), as relationships are formed and change through time and with love, as racism is addressed (By the way, Cat and Chicken are biracial, but author Gillian McDunn writes about the racism with gentleness, never beating the reader/listener over the head with it, writing mostly how Grandpa takes pride in: Yes, this is my GRANDdaughter, and she’ll have every sample of ice cream you’ve got, thank you very much!). Morris does a few vocal gyrations for accents of the many, many locals, but for the main characters, the ones we grow to love? Well, we grow to love them through her warm performance.
This is about as Feel-Good a listen as you’ll ever wanna find, and if you’re ready to brush a tear or two away, if you’re ready to flash smiles of pride in just how good humans can be, this is a story you’ll want to be hearing.
And the cover art? It says it all: Two kids, facing the beautiful Unknown, back to back, together forever.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.