Marilyn Eisenstein, author of the picture book Periwinkle Isn’t Paris, introduces us here to Kate, who doesn’t like waiting for anything: “for her hair to grow until it tickled her shoulders, for her juice to be poured, for car rides to end.”

In this story, which begins in early spring while driving to the farm, Kate is told “you’ll have to wait” for cows and corn, for kittens to grow up, and to become best friends with neighbour Jessie. The story focuses on the long wait between planting strawberries and harvesting the wonderfully sweet crop.

Kate is an early candidate for road rage: she yells and hollers at the plants and gives them a good kick, demanding that they “Grow, grow, grow!” But after her mother explains, “You can’t just wait for them to grow, Kate. You have to help them,” she takes the watering seriously and even at one point pleads softly to the plants, “Please don’t die.”

Some of the descriptive writing is lovely: “buttercups covered the wide-open fields like a soft yellow blanket” and Jessie’s “long line of freckles curved around her face like a country road.” But readers aren’t shown how Kate is transformed into someone who ends the book by declaring “Some things are just worth waiting for.” Nor is it clear whether she’ll now be patient with regard to clocks and car trips.

Australian-born Miranda Jones (now living in Saskatchewan) illustrated Troon Harrison’s The Floating Orchard. In Kate Can’t Wait, she uses a merrily loose black line around charming illustrations, although the broad decorated frames on each page take space away from them and add nothing to the story. Though the artwork is generally pretty and sunlit, its loose style gives the facial expressions of some of the characters (and the cats) a slightly unpleasant quality.