These memoirs of Catherine's are wonderful. I thourouglhy enjoy her clear and clever diction adds to the magnificent stories from her childhood that she craftily conveys as she saw it when she was a young girl. She perfectly gets the invisibility of being a child in her words, the confusing ignorance that comes with being inexperienced at life reminds us all of what it was like to be five or ten years old- how all the things that perplexed us; why we weren't allowed to say certain words and all the words we didn't know, and getting first hand impressions of emotions- the human condition- and only truly understanding it years after.
The tone is naturally light hearted because she is a little girl, and people are typically nice to little girls. Why not? Sometimes, when Cathy would be in a situation not appropriate for someone her age, to me it would read like the stories of Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. You still know that it is a grown woman, obviously sophistocated, who is writing (she doesn't make spelling and grammatical errors on purpose to make it really from a five year old).
The passage about Marie Sweeney falls into this well. Cathy does not know what the old woman meant when she said that she "fixed girls who were in trouble," and she admired her rebeliousness and vocabulary which she mimics (as children do) out of admiration and hopes of being more adult, but she does not now how outrageously inappropriate she is.
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