Your Best Friend, Kate

Your Best Friend, Kate

Written By Pat Brisson

Illustrated By Rick Brown

Appropriate for Grades 1-6

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Have you ever traveled through some of the United States of America? Have you ever gone on vacation and left your best friend and pets at home? In the story, Your Best Friend, Kate, the main character does this, but stays connected with her best friend from back home by writing her letters from wherever she goes. 

Pat Brisson’s Your Best Friend, Kate, features a young girl named Kate going on a vacation with her family and younger brother Brian. Kate leaves her two fish with her best friend Lucy to watch them while she is away. She is sad about leaving, and that poses a problem in the beginning of the story. Throughout the trip Kate writes letters to Lucy from every state they visit. These places include Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Kate learns so much on vacation, and teaches Lucy what she has learned through the letters. Kate also gets into small fights with her younger brother Brian, but that adds some comedy into the story!

I enjoyed how this book was set up into individual letters. There is no text in this story, outside of a letter written by Kate. She is telling Lucy about her adventures, as well as telling the story to the readers through her letters. I thought this was a cute way of telling the story. The language used is also appropriate for children to understand, and that helps them read. I once wrote letters to my friend from back home when I spent a summer in New Hampshire. However, my trip was not as exciting or eventful as Kate’s was. 

This book also features a learning element. Not only does the read gather some information about the places Kate visits by reading her letters, but around the outside of the letters, Kate includes some information about the state bird, state flower, or the state tree for every place she visits. This book would be great to read when learning about the states, because students are not only reading a story about the place, but they are also learning important information about each individual state. For example, when reading about Kate’s trip to North Carolina, the reader also learns that the state flower is dogwood and the state bird is the cardinal.

Your Best Friend, Kate, is great for students in the age group of 6-12 years old. The students need to be old enough to understand travel and be old enough to understand some of the historical sites that Kate and her family visit. Classroom teachers would use this book when teaching about travel and the United States. This book grabs the interest of the children reading, and they won’t want to put it down. The information in here is very useful for a geography unit. Furthermore, connections to the Massachusetts ELA Frameworks include key ideas and details (3), craft and structure (6), and integration of knowledge and ideas (7).