Reading: Meet Kit by Valerie Tripp

When I was ten years old going on eleven, there was nothing I wanted more in the world than an American Girl doll.  Both of my best friends had one and I was extremely jealous.  Each doll had her own beautiful hair and beautiful face and beautiful outfits and six books that told their story and they were so much more sophisticated than cuddly soft Kelly dolls.  The only thing that bothered me was that each doll was so expensive - $100.  To me, that seemed like a fortune.  My mom took me to Barnes and Noble in the fall to buy the first two Samantha books and I remember reading them during free time in fifth grade.  But the doll I really wanted was Kit.  I loved her short blonde hair and her pretty purple outfit and beige hat.  Christmas 2001, she was wrapped up under the tree with her first book, Meet Kit, beside her.  I loved Kit and I loved reading her book.  I never read an American Girl book since then though.  I always wanted to read the full Samantha series and Kit series and I even had the Molly series but I read other books instead.  What I loved about the books was the history element they held.  Each American Girl is living during a certain time period and has different struggles to face.  At the end of each American Girl book was a brief history lesson that I seemed to enjoy reading far more than my history book.
What is great about this 50 book challenge is that I have the opportunity to read and re-read a lot of books that I most likely would have never picked up.  I always wanted to come back to the American Girl novels just to relive the experience of reading them.  Meet Kit was a great place to start.  American Girl can sometimes be seen as an over-hyped franchise but I think it does live up to it's promise.  With these dolls and stories it gives young girls someone to relate to.  No one I knew personally as a kid wanted to write a newspaper but Kit did and I longed that she were a real person so we could create a newspaper together! That is what is so, for lack of a better word, magical about reading!  You are taken to so many different places to meet so many new people!

Meet Kit was an easy read but very enjoyable.  While the book's writing wasn't anything entirely special, the story was.  Meet Kit is the story of young Kit Kittredge who is living during the Great Depression.  The gossip is that people are loosing their jobs left and right and Kit can't wait to write about it in her notepad.  But the excitement about this gossip fades when Kit realizes that her father is one of those people who has lost his job.  Wanting to do something, Kit creates her own newspaper and writes about what is going on.  Her mother rents out their empty bedrooms so the family can earn money and not be kicked out of their home like so many other families had been.  Kit is a very resourceful and relatable character.  Her love for writing was one that I'm sure my eleven year old self could have related too. 
Meet Kit was a very fast read as well as engaging.  It was interesting to read about the Great Depression through the eyes of a young girl who doesn't quite yet understand the world.  Wouldn't it be interesting if these books were rewritten in a more literary way?  I would love to see that.  Anyway, it was a good read and I give the book 3.5 out of 5 stars.