Admittedly, I remember very little from the 1970s beyond having panel walls in our kitchen, and matted mustard carpeting in the living room. So, luckily, I am able to see beyond the frustrations of sexually stifled housewife Sandy Pressman, and instead take Judy Blume’s hidden-in-the-hamper novel from the era for something better: Wifey is Pure. Comic. Gold.
The book opens with Sandy Pressman looking out her window upon waking, and finding a man wearing just a bed sheet — which he quickly sheds — and a stars and stripes helmet, standing on the edge of her yard. He precedes to coax himself toward the proverbial second base, then zip away naked on his motorcycle. She calls her husband, who then calls the police. When a cop stops by to get her statement, Sandy recounts the “crime scene” and adds the final detail that defines the tone of the rest of the book.
“I just remembered … he was left handed,” she tells the sergeant.
Well, well, wellsy, Lady Hot Pants Pressman. You noticed. Rawr.
This experience kicks off a sexual something. Not an awakening, per se. Sandy took some pretty experimental tours around the old block back in the day with a super-creative lad named Shep. But she has gained a sort of sexual acceptance: that her three minutes of Saturday night special — which her blase husband Norman tops off with gargling, scrubbing, and air freshener — is no match for the memories of her time with no-holds barred Shep. Meanwhile, all around her, the mens are sitting up and taking notice of the Jackie O. lookalike. Her body becomes a sort of scratching post for those who inhale her pheromones. And a good time is had by all.
This causes an understandable amount of disdain for her mousy master of a husband, who does things like cut out photographs of hairstyles from magazines for her to consider, and push her toward more time at the Country Club, where she should be learning to play golf and tennis and socializing with the sophisticates.
What a delicious, hokey, and charming read from the woman who taught us all how they strapped on maxi pads in the old-fashioned days. Thankfully we don’t have to hide it on a high shelf anymore. It’s so hard to imagine a time when this novel wasn’t the height of hilarity.
Once I chewed through every Scott Pilgrim book currently available, I felt a little bereft. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just jump into another graphic novel. What if it wasn’t funny enough? What if there wasn’t any magical-realismesque video game action? What if, what if it wasn’t any good?
Lucky for me the answer came in the form of a big box of graphic novels from Largehearted boy. In that treasure trove, I unearthed Lost At Sea, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s first book.
It was the perfect balm for my Scott Pilgrim withdrawal.
How so? Because it was the not so bad, not so good way to get over my Scottaholism.
Lost at Sea is a road trip graphic novel about four Canadian teens driving home from California. The star of the book is Raleigh, an intellectually gifted 18-year-old who has no soul. At least she doesn’t think she has a soul, she’s pretty sure a cat stole it when she was younger.
She happened upon this trio of classmates coincidence in California, where Raleigh was supposed to be visiting her estranged father but instead had hooked up with her Internet boyfriend.
What I liked about this one is that you can see glimpses of Scott Pilgrim in it. The friendships where affection is shown through acerbic wit and sarcasm, the floundering hero looking trying to come of age, and the littlest bit of music.
What I didn’t like about this one is that it feels really floaty. A lot of questions are brought up or insinuated but never fully explained or answered. At one point Raleigh vaguely mentions that her mother sold her (and her sisters) to a man in the very same Oregon town the group is stuck in after their car breaks down. Is this true? I can’t tell.
I’m not entirely sure what really happened with the Internet boyfriend either. Like I said it’s kind of floaty.
However, there is a scene towards the end of the book where the group is trying to capture stray cats in the hopes of helping Raleigh get her soul back. It’s beautiful, funny, and poignant. Probably worth the price of reading the book alone. It so perfectly captures the lengths true friends will go to when you’re in need.
This is one of those books I’d probably have adored when I was about twenty-two. There’s just something about the hopeless romanticism, the melodrama, and the what’s it all mean-ness of it that will appeal to young people who are at that point in their lives. Which, I guess, kind of makes sense, since the book is aimed at the late-teen crowd.
Like I said, it’s okay. There are worse ways to spend an hour. However, if you’re looking for a good step down from Scott Pilgrim while you wait the arrival of the last one, it’s absolutely perfect.
Earlier this week, I went down to MPR’s offices in St. Paul to record a segment for Art Hounds. I was there to talk about Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point and his reading 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 15th at Magers & Quinn (3038 Hennepin Ave. So, Minneapolis).
You can listen to the segment:
I wanted to read American Widow by Alissa Torres ever since I spied it on Largehearted Boy’s list of favorite graphic novels of 2008. When it arrived in a big box of books David sent me I was giddy. I was intrigued for years by the bare bones of the story — young woman loses husband on 9-11 while seven months pregnant. Yikes, right?
So I was ready when I popped open the cover on a rainy Saturday — Kleenex and a big bottle of water to stave off the dehydration that can come when one sheds a copious amounts of tears. Bring it on, I said.
I’m sad to report, it was not brought. It feels callous to diss on a book written by a young widow who lost her husband in a great, senseless tragedy, especially a young widow who is now raising their son alone. But you know what? I have to say this book left me cold. While it was quite educational, it was not emotionally gripping.
What the what what? How can this story so fraught with sadness not be gripping?
On the surface when you summarize the story in a few sentences, it is: In August 1998, Eddie and Alissa have a whirlwind romance in NYC and after seven months spent dancing throughout the city and falling in love, they marry. Fast forward to the wee small hours of the morning of September 11th, 2001 Alissa, seven months pregnant, lies awake next to her husband too angry to sleep. She turns her head from him when he kisses her goodbye before he leaves for his new job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the north tower of the World Trade Center. It’s his second day working there.
As planes crash into the towers, Alissa walks their dog and ponders leaving Eddie. Why she’s so angry we never find out. As a reader I was unsure if we don’t find out because in the aftermath of what happened on September 11th it just didn’t matter, or if the author was protecting her dead husband.
The rest of the book follows Alissa as she copes with the loss of her husband, the birth of her son, and the rollercoaster-y ride of being simultaneously pitied, lauded, and resented as the wife of someone killed in 9-11.
The book loses a lot of its emotional steam by spending a significant amount of time depicting how Alissa was forced to wade through an ocean of red tape to receive the money donated to the victims of 9-11. While this is educational and offers a new perspective on the way victims were treated after the tragedy, it doesn’t make for interesting reading. Maybe just seeing the first time the American Red Cross failed her would have been okay, but there are pages and pages and pages dedicated to the bureaucratic failings of the different disaster-relief agencies formed or in place to help victims. The bureaucrats’ insensitivity was horrifying, but reading about and seeing drawings of someone sitting in front of a desk . . . it’s just not interesting – narratively or visually.
This is a book that would have been served better by not being a graphic novel. As I turned each page I felt as though I was missing part of the story. The reader is left to glean a lot of information from the drawings, and they just aren’t up to the task. I think Torres’ story is one that’s important and needs to be told, it’s just not one that needs to be told graphically.
When it comes to dizzying collections of words, Ryu Murakami has long been the writer most likely to make me wretch with glee. He’s a Level 3 sensory offender, twiddling away at a reader’s gag reflex just because he can. There is a scene in his novel In the Miso Soup, (my favorite) that is so engraved in my brain that it has almost become a permanent ear worm. The depravity and desperation of Almost Transparent Blue have stuck with me for more than a decade. His novel Coin Locker Babies opens with such a shocking sentence that it’s a wonder anyone makes it to Page two — unfortunately.
But with 69, his roman a clef about a posse of restless, political, literary, music-loving teens noodling away at Simon & Garfunkel’s greatest hits on a guitar and talkin’ about a revolution, Murakami takes his best tool and hides it in a garage for the duration of the novel.
This is to say, I didn’t almost barf once.
Kensuke Yazaki is a trouble-maker, the only son of school teachers, a Pisces, an egomaniac. A romantic reading Rimbaud. He’s inspired by the political movements around him, and sets out to create his own. Shake things up at his school, which he sees as a mindless farm that churns out person after identical person. He borrows blueprints from pre-existing movements and organizes a faction of students to help him make statements: On one occasion they set up a barricade at the school, paint naughty graffiti all over the walls, coax a timid hanger-on to release an epic dump on the principal’s desk. This is part of a greater project: The Morning Erection Festival, during which he will show an original film starring some of the local high school hotties and with a little luck, find a white horse to co-star.
Much of this is to get the attention of a girl in his class, whom he refers to as “Lady Jane.” And, readers, she falls for it.
This book is to cute, what In the Miso Soup is to chilling. (Some people like to attach a Catcher in the Rye-like quantifier to it which is a bit of a stretch). In its best moments, Kensuke is 100 percent false bravado, quaking at the puckered lips in front of him. The last ten pages are pretty adorable, surprisingly. It doesn’t pack the punch of his grittier work, though.
My tolerance for junk theology and philosophy is very low. Though I have seen many quality self-help books based on sound principles, there are just as many bogus get rich quick scams disguised as self-help. One need only Google prosperity gospel or law of attraction and you’ll find the foundation of junk theology and philosophy. Sadly, you will also find a multitude of mindless followers as well.
When the self-help relies on exploitation to bolster its message, it descends into the obscene realm. Paulo Coelho’s The Illustrated Alchemist uses negative stereotypes of women and racist depictions of Romani people to lift up the main character’s voyage to discover his personal legend. It’s the same tired portrayal of Gypsies being thieves and only showing women as weak, passive characters. Coelho’s choice to do this negates any possible benefits to the reader. It also stops me from discussing the story any further. I have no time for looking past racism and sexism to find golden nuggets.
This book is supposed to be an inspirational piece for people to follow their dreams. While that is important, this book takes it a step too far by romanticizing that journey as something completely necessary to do regardless of one’s circumstances or the effects of that journey on other people. It is quite irresponsible and unrealistic. For authentic and truly inspirational reading, I recommend Eckhart Tolle or Parker Palmer. These thinkers do not rely on racist and sexist portrayals to lift up their message. Of course they demand reciprocal thinking on the reader’s part, something that might be lost with Alchemist apologists.
At some point we all sat around and wondered what the hell personal blogging would mean, ultimately, for the good old-fashioned world of the printed word. The kind that comes on paper, bound, with a flattering author portrait and blurbs from friends.
As an anecdote to that, I present Emily Gould’s book of personal essays And the Heart Says Whatever. The former go-go Gawker girl’s collection includes vignettes of being a sexually aware high school student wrist-deep in the trousers of an underclassman, to feeling like a freak-show at her college in the Midwest, to navigating the streets of the Lower East Side en route to gigs as a publishing assistant/hostess/shot girl. It is all tinged with the sort of romantic mooniness that comes with having an ex-boyfriend and/or making a self-destructive decision or two.
Gould, one of many young women living a certain intriguing lifestyle in the early aughts in NYC — in Gould’s case hipster! — was among the first to earn the title of “oversharer,” which is to mean that she occasionally mentioned her sex life in a public forum. Like most people who commit a word to the internet, then get addicted and commit more and more, there comes an illusion that you don’t have to have something to say. That if you write it, the audience will come because they, for instance, like your tattoos. With this comes the power to post “grilled cheese sandwich” accounts. This is what I had for lunch. And you should be fascinated by it because you are fascinated by me, dear audience.
And thus, Gould has written a book filled with the grilled cheese moments of her life — although instead of “what I had for lunch” it is “what I thought as I revisited my family’s beach house after my boyfriend and I broke up.”
These 11 essays are fine. They don’t take you by the hair and yank. And in fact, looking back at the titles it’s hard to define where one memory ends and another begins, what any one of them was about. Break ups, hook ups, jobs … very little about her experiences with Gawker — and admittedly, she wrote for the site when it still had headlines that rivaled The Onion. Nothing about her literati boyfriend Keith Gessen who wrote the great snooze-fest of 2008, All the Sad Literary Men. Plenty of metaphorical mirror gazing and second guessing.
Emily Gould is not the greatest writer in the world. But she’s spare and competent, and frequently houses a nice idea in a paragraph. And, frankly, she made enough words to turn them into a book, so she has that over millions of bloggers holding onto some sort of “Stephanie Klein and the magic book deal” syndrome. Gould is pleasant and likable. Her stories are are relate-able, but are in dire need of a bit of literary risk. This reminded me a bit of Sloane Crosley’s recyclable book of essays I Was Told There Would Be Cake, which is awfully boring, but garnered better reviews because of some sort of injustice in the universe.
Laurie Lindeen (who answered MN Reads 6 questions last year) sets us up for a solid rock-n-roll road-trip in Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story. With its sassy pink cover, this memoir will do its best to surprise you with brutal honesty and boundless energy. Lindeen and her band, Zuzu’s Petals, may not have it easy, but they show they can play right alongside the boys.
Within the first couple pages of the book, Lindeen is hitching a ride with Carly Simon, and it seems like anyone and everyone on the punk, indie, grunge scene of the 80s and 90s is mentioned. Lindeen namedrops with ease throughout the book, which may be a big plus to the musical historians among us, but a slight detractor to the average reader. What is obvious is that this girl eats, sleeps, and lives music.
This is my wedding night. I’m about to marry the stage. Now on the backside of my twenties, more and more friends are getting married and settling down. Not me, I’m acting up.”
pg 75
Playing hand-me-down instruments, surviving sketchy managers, emotionally-disturbed roadies, and rollercoaster relationships with friends, lovers, and family, it’s a wonder Zuzu’s Petals made it as far as they did. Lindeen’s bull-headed motivation is the secret driving force behind the band’s success. Her strength is revealed when you discover she has multiple sclerosis (MS). After a hard bout with MS, Lindeen goes into remission decides to rock out and rock hard. This complexity is what defines Lindeen in her life and music. One has to wish, though, that she were as open with this factor as she was with the rest of her musical struggles.
‘I have multiple sclerosis,’ I nervously sputter to Paul one evening while watching Deborah Kerr hide her crippledness in An Affair to Remember, ‘but I’m not really bothered by it or experiencing any symptoms or anything.’”
pg 224
Through all its somber moments, the book maintains its charm. The romance between Lindeen and The Replacements’ lead singer, Paul Westerberg, seems so natural that it must be meant to be: the Twin Cities own Cinderella-story super-couple. Petal Pusher proves that life and happiness are what you make of them. It also proves that not everyone is cut out for a rock-n-roll lifestyle.
Since I have encouraged everyone I know to go back and re-read the books they were younger, my Rock & Roll Bookclub chose J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey for our May read. It is one of my sister Ericka’s favorite books. I’m not entirely sure why, especially when you consider she’s a pretty devout Atheist. I’ve developed a theory, or rather am developing it as these letters fall from my keyboard that Ericka’s affection for this book is due, in large part, to her affection for Salinger’s writing and that Salinger’s obvious affection for the Glass family (Franny and Zooey are Glasses) has spilled on to her. Affection my osmosis, so to speak.
I do not have the same affection. Franny and Zooey, originally published in book-form in 1961 after appearing as stories in The New Yorker in the mid50s, is about the fabulous Glass family and young Franny’s existential crisis. Yawn.
Call me a heretic, but two-hundred pages of people talking gets to be a drag after about 100 pages. I was with Salinger during “Franny” while she has a bit of nervous breakdown that may or may not be influenced by (what seemed to me obvious) an unplanned pregnancy. Franny’s at lunch with her boyfriend Lane an Ivy-leaguer/pompous blowhard who spends the meal yammering on about how brilliant he is. Franny will have none of it and tears into his egocentric phony bullshit. It’s pretty awesome. Besides that, there’s all the delicious 50s-ness of the story and the smoking and the three martini lunch. Franny’s a-okay in my book.
But then we come to “Zooey.” This novella is a confusing mash of what the hell. It starts with an introduction by Buddy (#2 of the seven brilliant, beautiful Glass children) about how he’s writing this story after being told about the incident portrayed in the story.
We then join Zooey soaking in the bathtub reading a long letter from Buddy (all of which is introduced by Buddy, because there’s nothing quite like being told what’s going to happen before it happens). After Zooey finishes the letter he is joined in the bathroom by his mother, Bessie. She’s in a tizzy because Franny’s having a crisis and is currently sleeping on the couch. The scene in the bathroom between Zooey and Bessie is great, fraught with delicious tension and action that goes a long way to telling us about their characters.
Sadly though, the eventually leave the bathroom and thus begins a very long, very boring conversation between Franny who sits on the couch, pets a cat, and occasionally blows her nose, and Zooey who intermittently sits at a piano and lays on the floor. They talk about their weird childhood (basically being raised by Eastern-religion obsessed eldest brothers Seymour and Buddy), egotism, phoniness, and The Way of the Pilgrim (the book that triggers Franny’s crisis). While getting bits of the Glass family history is interesting, listening to two 20somethings wax philosophically about religion is not.
Zooey’s story seems to exist only so Salinger can work through his own spiritual issues, and frankly, I didn’t care.
The last time we visited our favorite Canadian Hipster doofus, he was getting in deep with Ramona Flowers, she of the seven evil exes. So deep that the couple has shacked up. What? Our favorite slacker has gotten a job and a live-in girlfriend? How can this be.
Alas, it is s. But no need to worry the Scott Pilgrim manages to make becoming a grown up totally awesome.
Volume five opens with Scott’s birthday party where he proclaims he’s going to be the best 24-year-old ever. But being 24 isn’t proving too easy for Scott. Two of Ramona’s evil-exes are back and they brought robots.
ROBOTS!
Did you just nearly faint with glee? Because I did. So there are the robots and Ramona’s head keeps doing this weird-glowy thing whenever she’s upset. It’s been glowing a lot. Especially when good ol’ Knives Chau comes around to kick Ramona’s ass. See, Knives just found out that while Scott was dating her he as also starting to see Ramona. Knives gets the best line in this book:
You stole him with with your advanced American slut technology. You are not nice!
Like Knives, Ramona is none-too-thrilled to learn of the cheating. But after getting shit-faced drunk at a party she seems to have forgiven Scott.
But for poor Scott things get worse. While Ramona showers and contemplates the future of their relationship, Scott’s BFF Kim (the drummer in Sex-Bob-Omb) is kidnapped by the evil-exes. When he returns from saving his life, Ramona tries to make a confession and then disappears. Left in her wake is a letter labeled “Gideon” and a strange cat.
The rest of the book follows Scott as he copes with his loss.
Most of Volume 5 feels a little bit like a ramp up to Volume 6 (out July 20). Kind of like how the movie Spiderman felt like it’s sole purpose was to introduce characters for Spiderman 2 where all the good stuff takes place. That’s what Volume 5 is. . . scene setting. Funny, entertaining scene-setting, but scene-setting nonetheless.
I still can’t wait for Volume 6. I’m obsessed. And terrified. I’m not sure what kind of ending will be satisfying, but I have faith that Bryan Lee O’Malley can pull it off.
A.M. Homes seems to have assembled the stories in The Safety of Objects with an eye toward pushing the envelope. Sometimes, she pushes that envelope too far, but she does so in the interest of creating a potent sampler of abnormality.
All the entries in The Safety of Objects are weird and provocative. Homes’ writing is so un-frilly, so devoid of anything figurative, it’s almost aseptic. She likes to let her subject matter – a boy sexually obsessed with his sister’s Barbie doll, a father going deranged in bland, bland suburbia – do the talking. That approach succeeds so long as the topic is sufficiently familiar; we’ve all heard of child abductions, for instance, but they’re foreign enough to still be creepily fascinating. Homes’ best stories here have a decidedly calm demeanor that belies a serious problem. “Looking for Johnny,” a story about a kidnapped boy who is returned when he doesn’t match his captor’s expectations, is made chilling by the boy’s flat, cool narration. “Chunky in Heat” succeeds as a hallucination bathed in the haze and blear of an aimless summer night familiar to any bored teenager. “Esther in the Night” is a haunting glimpse into a side of parenthood few would willing to talk about.
But one time too many, Homes goes off the deep end. For instance, “Yours Truly” and “The Bullet Catcher,” both narrated in the first person, have the same problem. They’re too strange and have no definite purpose. On finishing each, I couldn’t answer the question I posed to myself: “What was the point of that?” It could be argued they’re explorations of character, but they’re so far gone they’re not relatable.
Fortunately, there aren’t enough bad stories to test the reader’s patience. The Safety of Objects emerges as the most unsettling kind of strange of all – the kind that sees itself as perfectly normal.
MN Reads is going to take the weekend off and will be back with new reviews on Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m going to fill my spare time with some books. I gotta finish Franny and Zooey by Sunday for Rock & Roll Bookclub (and there is already much debate swirling about the Franny pregnancy issue).
Then I plan to tear through Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power about women in 90s rock. I trust I’ll have a lot to say about this one. After that will be Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. Why? Because it’s Rock & Roll June where I spend the month reading books about rock and roll. Jennifer Egan’s (much anticipated) A Visit from the Goon Squad will also be in the mix. I loved Jennifer Egan’s last two novels (Look at Me and The Keep) and cannot wait to get my hands on this new one.
What are you gonna read over the weekend?
Every time I start to write about one of the books in the Scott Pilgrim series, I thumb through the book to refresh my memory. Without fail, each page I land on brings a giant smile to my face. It’s probably my job as a “reviewer” (in quotes because I’m not sure I really review books so much as talk about them and being a book talker sounds dumb) to explain exactly what it is about these books that’s so appealing. Now I’m talking about Volume 4 of the six-volume series and I still haven’t captured the magic.
Perhaps Scott Pilgrim is something you have to experience. After I finished the first two volumes, I loaned them to my 11-year-old nephew Max. He devoured them quickly and asked for the rest of the series. He finished it in a day or two. That’s how awesome these books are.
I am not surprised that Max and I love the books equally. He probably got all the video game references and inside jokes that went right by me. I’d also wager he didn’t get many (if any) of the indie rock references. See? There’s something for everyone.
Volume 4, Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together finds Scott at an emotional crossroads. He can either continue on in his unemployed, sharing a bed with Wallace, his gay roommate, ways or he can pony up and act like an adult.
This inability to grow up or at least start acting like a grown-up puts a lot of strain on Scott’s relationship with Ramona. While you can tell she loves him, she’s really ready for him to start putting some effort into life.
Then, of course there’s the exes to deal with — for both Scott and Ramona. Scott’s ex is less on the evil side and more on the romantically dangerous side. Ramona’s ex is, of course, evil, but not an ex-boyfriend. Shock!
This volume is not as full of the silly videogame fighting (though still with the life as a videogame stuff — Scott gets 999 exp points when he gets a job), it does a lot of move the story of Ramona and Scott’s relationship forward. It’s nice because you can see O’Malley raising the emotional stakes as the series races to its conclusion. And gah, I cannot wait for Volume 6 to come out.
Katniss Everdeen is back in Catching Fire, the second novel in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Earlier I hailed the first book, The Hunger Games, because I loved the strong, intelligent, ballsy Katniss, and I could do the same for this one.
After having won the Hunger Games for herself and Peeta by doing a small, smart act of defiance against the Capitol, Katniss returns as a hero in her district and the other districts of Panem. This new hero status has not made her a favorite of the Capitol, partly because her defiance became a catalyst for other districts to rise up against them.
Uprisings against the Capitol are difficult in Panem because the districts are completely secluded from each other. Katniss hears rumors of uprisings, but in an attempt to keep the districts under control, and to punish Katniss, the Capitol sends violent troops to all the districts and states a new rule for this year’s Hunger Games – competitors must have been previous Hunger Games champions. Katniss was the only female champion from her district, so back into the fight-to-the-death games she goes.
The games are still unbelievably barbaric. Competitors fighting to the death, while throughout the arena the most outrageous obstacles are in their way, like fog that kills, monkeys that claw, and blood raining from the skies. What does it say about me that I find all of this absolutely fascinating?
But it is fascinating! The characters are secretive and interesting, the control of the Capitol and possible uprising keeps me turning the pages, and the cliffhanger ending has me counting down the days until the final book is released. If you haven’t read The Hunger Games you need to do that before you dive into this one, so start reading because the third book, Mockingjay, comes out in August and I have a feeling none of us will want to miss it.
Beezus is nine and she’s got a bratty handful of a four-year-old sister, Ramona. Beezus likes to embroider pot holders, read books, and take art classes. Ramona likes to ride her tricycle in the house while playing the harmonica, wander off in search of the end of the rainbow, and bug the crap out of her sister.
When I was seven or eight, Beezus and Ramona was one of my very favorite books on the planet. I loved Beezus and loved despising Ramona. For thirty years the images in Beverly Cleary’s books have stuck with me even though I don’t remember reading them more than once or twice.
This time around, I relented a bit on my strict anti-Ramona stance. It wasn’t easy. But at one point, Beezus begs Ramona to stop checking out books about steam shovels and get something more girlie. Hrmph! Ramona, of course, stays true to her steam-shovel-loving ways and I was proud.
I like to believe Beverly Clearly was a little ahead of her time, making Ramona a feminist and individual in a pre-Feminine Mystique era. Nice work, Ms. Clearly. The 1955ness of Beezus and Ramona is a little hard to escape and I wonder how younger readers would react. In our overprotective society a nine-year-old girl and her four-year-old sister would never be allowed to walk to the library alone, or to art classes at the park.
And, I do have to give props to Cleary for Aunt Beatrice who comes in and saves Beezus’ Birthday. Aunt Beatrice’s character was one I didn’t remember, sadly. She made reading this book quite cathartic.
Another thing that struck me about this book was what a debt Judy Blume probably owes Cleary. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (which I just reread) shares a lot of the same story elements (parties, younger siblings ruining something important, food issues, etc.). I’d even go so far to say that Beezus and Ramona are female precursors to Peter Hatcher and Fudge (maybe this is a well-known fact in the world of children’s literature, I have no idea).
Even though Tales is funnier, Beezus is no match for Peter Hatcher’s wit, Cleary’s book is still a fun and funny (mostly situational funniness) book that any one with a sibling (whether bossy older or bratty younger) will enjoy.
