My next-door neighbors were having a yard sale on Sunday, and the daughter, who's probably twelve now and has outgrown such nonsense, was selling two Ramona books for 25 cents each. I couldn't resist, I was filled with too much nostalgia for when I loved these books as a kid.
The funny thing I never realized when I read these long ago, is the ridiculously long time span over which Beverly Cleary has written these books. Ramona Quimby, age 8 was written in 1982, at least ten years later than I would have guessed. When I was first reading this, it must have been some seriously right-off-the-presses hottness--I had no idea. Beezus and Ramona, on the other hand, set 4 years earlier, was written in 1955. Mind-blowingly, I found out from wikipedia while double-checking my dates that there is another Ramona book I have never heard of from 1999. It is like a creepy reverse version of that really godawful Robin Williams movie, the one where he's a six-year-old dying from premature oldness disease in a sadly-poignant-yet-wackily-comedic manner, to think that spunky ostensibly-nine-years-old Ramona is actually 48 years old in that book. Gah! Weird factor eleven.
So if you pay attention, which I couldn't help doing this time, you can see the sands shifting under the small-town wholesomeness of the Quimby household: in 1955, mother is presumed to be home all day with the kids while father is off at some unspecific job, while by 1982 mom's the breadwinner while dad is working part-time and going back to college to become a children's art teacher. That's cool. Still, you have to be looking hard to see it move--there's a static archetypical atmosphere in their neighborhood that's almost as mythic as middle earth. Even the approaching-millenial Quimbys live in a world where it's totally normal for a family with two kids to store a barrel of apples in their basement and to only go out for burgers once every couple months. That's actually kind of cool.Now I need to find one or more young children to give these away to again, since I have more than gotten my fifty cents worth. (Anyone in Seattle need young person books?)
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