THE GIRL WITH THE CAT

A girl becomes attached to a piece of art in a gallery.

Exploring a new city with her older brother, the first-person narrator wanders into an art gallery and falls in love with a bronze sculpture of a girl in a rocking chair with a cat. Nine-year-old Caroline bonds with the sculpture, running her hands over it and talking to it: about ice cream, about being forced to give away her own cat when her family moved, and about not having friends. When the sculpture’s due to leave the gallery, Caroline gathers her spare change and begs for it to stay, spurring a donation campaign that succeeds. Brenna’s core arc is true: a real White girl in 1966, a sculpture, a handwritten letter, a donation campaign. Caroline Markham’s full name, relevant city names (Saskatoon, Toronto, Ottawa), and even the gallery director’s name are specified in the main text; egregiously, the real sculptor, Arthur Price, goes unnamed—even in the backmatter (he is named in flap copy). Kerrigan’s rendering of the sculpture is too watery and low-saturation to evoke bronze; the gallery’s many paintings—which Caroline also loves—are visually pleasant and peaceful but indistinct. Inexplicably, the text minutely changes the sculpture’s name—from Girl With Cat to The Girl and the Cat—and changes the Mendel Art Gallery to the generic Art Gallery.

This odd combination of specificity and vagueness is more about the protagonist’s personal arc than about art.