Vicki Myron's Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touch The World

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World is a biography by Vicki Myron, which tells the story of her library cat, Dewey, and how he had helped shape not only herself, but a whole town. One winter morning in small-town Spencer, Iowa, a small kitten was shoved into the local library’s drop box, where Vicki at the time worked as a librarian. With help from the library staff, the kitten is nursed back to health, and the community of Spencer chooses to name him “Dewey” during a contest held for name ideas. One day, Dewey had escaped the library and went missing for two days – afterwards, he made the choice of spending the rest of his life as a library cat. As Vicki had said after Dewey’s escape, “I can see now, in hindsight, that …show more content…
He’s a protagonist; one example of this is how he had changed the atmosphere in Spencer during economic hardships, where Vicki states, “All I knew was that, from the moment we found him, Dewey believed everything was going to be fine. And when he was around, he made others believe that too” (Myron, 25). He is also a dynamic character; for example, he had started off as an adventurous and curious kitten, but after his escape into the outdoors, he had seemed to mature and decided to stay in the library for the next sixteen years of his life. However, some aspects of him had remained static, such as his somewhat humble personality or his gentle touch. Dewey had affected the world, but not by doing something great – Vicki states that “Dewey wasn’t special because he did something extraordinary but because he was extraordinary” (Myron, 209). He simply found his place and made everyone feel loved - “He never left anyone out or took anyone for granted. If you were receptive, he was there for you. If you weren’t receptive, he worked to bring you around” (Myron, 209). Not everyone started off as a Dewey fan, however; the parents were skeptical about him during his first few days in the library, and the library board had tried to go against him a few times, but Dewey had always managed to win them over in the end. He had proven that libraries did matter to their communities and always comforted the ones who were suffering the most. Dewey had even helped Vicki get the approval of the city council for remodeling the library; “The conversation must have reached Sister’s Café, because eventually even the city council started to notice. Slowly their attitude shifted. First they stopped laughing at me. Then they started listening” (Myron,