[In the following review, Tyler calls One-Eyed Cat a "book of real value" because of its honest portrayal of the parent-child dynamic.]

In Paula Fox's 20-odd years of writing for children, she has distinguished herself as a teller of mingled tales. Let other authors underestimate their young readers' intelligence however they will, creating entirely villainous villains and entirely heroic heroes—but Miss Fox trusts that even children know life is a complex, inconclusive, intriguingly gray-toned affair.

One-Eyed Cat is a story about an introspective 11-year-old boy, the only child of a minister and his wife, who is immobilized by arthritis. The year is 1935, the place is a small town in New York State, and Ned Wallis is the boy attempting to be the perfect person his parents believe him to be. Or perhaps we should say the person he imagines they believe him to be, for his mother confesses straight out that she's not your standard saintly invalid, and his father is a fine enough minister to be unsurprised by ordinary human error.

In Ned's case, the error is thoughtless cruelty. It so happens that a maternal uncle has brought him a loaded Daisy air rifle for his birthday. His father confiscates it, explaining that while the uncle's earlier presents—archeological treasures of various sorts—provided material for the imagination, all that one can imagine with a rifle is "something dead." The rifle goes to the attic. But in the dark of night, Ned sneaks it outdoors for just one shot, and that's what sets the plot in motion. He shoots at a sort of shadow, although semiconsciously he knows it may be more than a shadow. His target is a cat, which loses an eye to Ned's bullet.

For Ned, the knowledge of his guilt marks the beginning of a new distance from his parents. "It was with the gun that his trouble had started. Yet the gun hardly seemed to matter now. It was as if he'd moved away, not to the parsonage next to the church, or to Waterville, but a thousand miles away from home. What did matter was that he had a strange new life his parents knew nothing about and one that he must continue to keep hidden from them. Each lie he told them made the secret bigger, and that meant even more lies. He didn't know how to stop."

Luckily, he has a chance to redeem himself. While he's helping an elderly neighbor with his chores, he sees the cat again and takes steps to feed and shelter it, all the while continuing to keep his guilt a secret. How he finally confesses—and to whom—makes for a genuinely affecting scene.

The story moves slowly at times, perhaps too slowly for younger readers, and it suffers on occasion from a sense of indirection. The uncle who brought the rifle, for instance, invites Ned to take a trip with him. With some reluctance, Ned accepts the invitation, but eventually he changes his mind and stays home. One feels that the author herself may have changed her mind; what was introduced as an important element of the plot peters out without having served much purpose.

Generally, though, One-Eyed Cat succeeds. It's full of well-drawn, complicated characters—Mrs. Scallop, the insensitive housekeeper who means well nonetheless; the lonely old man who waits for his grown daughter's postcards, even though she just sends him the same one over and over; and two very appealing parents. There's integrity in the plot, as you'll realize when the housekeeper tells Ned that his mother's disease was caused by Ned's birth. In a slicker story, Ned would have brooded over her words throughout the rest of the book and never let his mother know why. In One-Eyed Cat, he tells his mother at once, and she dismisses the notion conclusively—and anyhow, he never really believed it from the start.

Most important, though, is what the story can teach young readers about grown-ups' expectations of them. If I had a child right now in his middle years—old enough to land himself in some sort of mess, young enough not to know yet that his parents themselves are imperfect—I would offer him this book. It says clearly, but never too baldly, that parents are not so easily scandalized as all that, that what disturbs them more than their children's mistakes is the sense that their children are concealing serious worries: This is what makes One-Eyed Cat a book of real value.