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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1557091498
| 9781557091499
| 1557091498
| 3.90
| 5,337
| 1928
| Nov 01, 1997
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 044808905X
| 9780448089058
| 044808905X
| 3.93
| 6,558
| 1928
| Jun 2003
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089041
| 9780448089041
| 0448089041
| 3.92
| 7,512
| 1928
| Mar 28, 1962
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089548
| 9780448089546
| 0448089548
| 3.78
| 1,401
| Jan 01, 1975
| Jan 01, 1975
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089513
| 9780448089515
| B002C1S0Q6
| 3.75
| 1,480
| Jan 01, 1972
| Jan 01, 1997
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Unknown Binding
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089033
| 9780448089034
| 0448089033
| 3.90
| 8,871
| 1927
| 1990
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089025
| 9780448089027
| 0448089025
| 3.95
| 10,890
| 1927
| 1994
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1557091447
| 9781557091444
| 1557091447
| 3.92
| 18,504
| 1927
| Oct 01, 1991
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 9798853859326
| B0CGL9VCDJ
| 4.00
| 1
| unknown
| Aug 22, 2023
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #81. For the sake of ethical disclosure, let me mention upfront that I was the editor of this book, and was paid to make it read the way i
2023 reads, #81. For the sake of ethical disclosure, let me mention upfront that I was the editor of this book, and was paid to make it read the way it now does, so my thoughts of course will be biased because of this, which you should keep in mind when reading my review. That said, I rather enjoyed this small children's book that covers the basic issues of personal finance (how to save money, how to budget, how to invest, how loans work, etc.), told through the filter of two preteen kids who one day discover a time machine in the back woods behind their house, and end up visiting Founding Father Benjamin Franklin right on the eve of him publishing his 1758 The Way to Wealth. We were careful to keep the language in a style that will be understandable and enjoyable for fellow preteens from 8 to 12, so it's a testament to Simbert's financial skills that he was able to take sometimes complicated subjects (such as the concept of interest rates and why they change from one loan to another) and make them understandable for even most third-graders and then going up from there. It's written in what will perhaps be perceived as an old-fashioned style, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 -- like all good Victorian children's books as well, the children on display here are always deferential to and obedient of all the adults in their lives, and display a "gee whiz!" attitude about virtually every subject they come across that is a little out of step with the contemporary mores of 21st-century children's literature. But as long as you have kids who don't mind that more formal style of characterization, there are a lot of good lessons to be learned here about financial prudence, gratification delay, how the early bird gets the worm, and all kinds of other practical wisdom still to be gleaned from the writings of this centuries-old inventor and statesman. It comes warmly recommended in this spirit. ...more |
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2
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not set
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Oct 27, 2023
not set
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Oct 27, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0385732953
| 9780385732956
| 0385732953
| 4.24
| 26,101
| 1951
| Aug 23, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, t
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, to not only become a successful children's author but a highly influential and groundbreaking one, in the spirit of Judy Blume or John Green; so that has her reading classics from the genre these days that first missed her attention as an actual child, which in turn has me occasionally reading children's classics that first missed my own attention as an actual child. This is one of them, first published in 1951, eventual winner of the Charles W. Follett Award and the first-ever National Jewish Book Award for children's literature; it can be rightly called "Little House on the Prairie but for an urban Jewish family," in that it's based on the true childhood of the author (who was in late middle-age when she wrote it), who grew up in a Yiddish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1910s, in the height of its days as a tenement-filled magnet for fresh Eastern European immigrants, especially Yiddish Jews from Tsarist Russia's "Pale of Settlement" (i.e. the countries that have always borne the brunt of the damage from Russia's collisions with the West -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.). To be clear, it's very well-done, a charming and captivating look back at these crowded, noisy, smelly streets from the nostalgic filter of an eight-year-old girl who saw it all with magic and wonder; but as I pointed out to my friend in our mini-book club of it afterwards, it's not a coincidence at all that this found a publisher just three years after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, and I remarked how if it this had come out twenty years previous or twenty years in the future, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of traction from society that it did by coming out directly after the Holocaust, when the Western arts was looking for as many heartwarming stories about Judaism they could find. Also, be aware that this is written from a pre-Beverly Cleary point of influence, i.e. all the kids are angelic little docile sweethearts and the forever wise parents are always patient and understanding, one of the last big hurrahs of the "Don't Speak Unless Ye Have Been Spoken To" school of children's literature before Mid-Century Modernism and then Postmodernism put an end to it for good. Still, the pure joy the girls get out of things like the giant beards and bellies of all the shopkeepers along their street, or eating a plain baked sweet potato for a penny because it's literally the one thing they'll have all week with any kind of sugar in it whatsoever, is worth the time alone it takes to read this slim little volume, not to mention the entire chapter devoted to all the sisters getting scarlet fever (!), which is to say nothing of the ridiculously Dickensian coincidence to end the entire thing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a chance to see a forgotten classic written in a Mid-Century Modernist style but about subjects you've never seen Mid-Century Modernism take on before, an eye-opening experience still very much worth the time of your own current tween kids. ...more |
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2
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not set
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Apr 03, 2022
not set
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Apr 03, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.94
| 8,122
| 1964
| 2000
|
it was amazing
|
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 23, 2021
May 23, 2021
|
May 23, 2021
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 4.07
| 4,827
| 1962
| Mar 18, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
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| 4.03
| 6,706
| 1957
| Mar 18, 2014
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it was amazing
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Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
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| 0380728028
| 9780380728022
| 0380728028
| 3.88
| 2,846
| Sep 20, 1991
| Jul 01, 1996
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liked it
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2021 reads, #22. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my c
2021 reads, #22. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves. Today's book is from the end of Cleary's career, published in 1991 when she was 75 years old, and there's no other choice but to admit that her age is quite clearly showing here, the work of a deeply elderly woman who at that point had not only grown-up children but now grown-up grandchildren, with 38 books now under her belt and for very understandable reasons was simply running out of steam as a creative writer. It's not so much that this book is bad -- it's yet another chapter-book for tweens about the genteel adventures of a kid slightly older than them, which like we examined in Ramona and Her Mother is the product of Cleary's late-career turn into "social realism YA," inspired by peers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, making this as much about the anxiety and loneliness issues of our hero Leigh Botts (he of the previous book I most recently reviewed, 1983's Dear Mr. Henshaw) as it is about the random dog he comes across at the beach one day and eventually adopts, the same plot as Cleary's very first book (1950's Henry Huggins, also reviewed as part of this series) but now with a darker and more melancholic tone. No, the problem is that, just like anything that was once daring but then was co-opted by everyone else once it became popular, child audiences were growing weary by the '90s with these kinds of "Cassavetes for Kids" stories; and I don't think it's any coincidence at all that a mere six years separates this book from the publication of the first "Harry Potter" volume, a new changing of the guard just as necessary and paradigm-changing as Cleary's own changing of the guard back in the years after World War Two, in her case from the weepy wish-fulfillment Dickensian Victorian tales that were the norm for children's literature at the time. That doesn't make Strider an objectively bad book in hindsight, but certainly it was a story type that had been played out by the time it was published; and after its disappointing results both commercially and critically, the world would have to wait an entire additional decade and a half before the ascendancy of Cleary and Blume's spiritual inheritor, John Green of The Fault in Our Stars fame. This should all be kept in mind before approaching it yourself, an interesting book from a historical perspective but definitely not the one to start with if approaching Cleary for the first time. The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
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| 0380709589
| 9780380709588
| 0380709589
| 3.78
| 41,045
| Aug 22, 1983
| May 31, 2000
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it was ok
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2021 reads, #20. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my c
2021 reads, #20. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves. Today's book had me thinking about when I first decided to start reading widely in contemporary children's literature, back younger in life when I once briefly thought about becoming a children's author myself. I was trying to find books to read to see what the "lay of the land" was, so to speak, and one of the things I was doing was checking out all the recent winners of the Newbery Medal; but then those who are in the know more than me warned me that Newbery winners carried a certain odd reputation, in that they were largely books that make adult NPR intellectuals swoon but their children go, "Eh, whatever." This 1983 Newbery winner feels like that, a book from a woman entering her seventies and aging into "living legend" respectability, which is what brings out all the awards for all the stuff that often makes their biggest fans go, "...Mmmmeh? I guess?" It's an epistolary novel, which is already a bit pretentious, in which we read the letters being sent by a kid throughout all the grades of grade school, to his favorite children's author who is clearly a younger male stand-in for Cleary herself; then it takes a turn for the really earnest halfway in, as we learn more about the broken home the kid is writing from, all the turmoil going on in his family, and how lonely and disconnected he's been feeling except to these letters to his favorite author. And I mean, yes, okay? I know some people will have been really lonely children themselves when they read this? And I'm sure it connected with you in this deeply personal way that I want to honor and not diminish? But I gotta be frank -- I'll take a bratty four-year-old Ramona Quimby sitting on a hot summer sidewalk, taking a giant bite out of a humongous one-pound brick of butter, any day of the week over this afterschool special stuff, which I appreciate for existing but just is really the work of a woman entering her septuagenarian years and beginning to rest of her laurels. Her books pick up more and more of this kind of reputation as she makes her way through the '90s and closes out her career; but we'll examine that in the last book of my re-read, the sequel to today's, 1991's Strider, written at the spry age of 74. The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
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| 038072801X
| 9780380728015
| 038072801X
| 4.08
| 34,646
| Apr 28, 1984
| Jan 01, 1996
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liked it
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2021 reads, #19. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my c
2021 reads, #19. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves. I've never read an interview where Cleary addressed the subject, so I'm not sure if she originally meant for today's title to officially be the last of the Postmodernist-era "Ramona" books of which she's now mostly remembered; but certainly this one was written in the same time period as the others (a six-book string that includes 1968's Ramona the Pest, 1975's Ramona the Brave, the two-part Ramona and Her Father and Ramona and Her Mother from 1977 and '79, and 1981's Ramona Quimby, Age 8), while the book that now technically finishes out the series, 1999's Ramona's World, was not only written 20 years after the others, but was also the last book Cleary ever wrote, and was published almost exactly on the 50th anniversary of her very first book, so perhaps that one is best thought of as a "victory lap" at the end of her career while this book is meant to be the proper end of Ramona's actual adventures. Of course, Ramona shows up in four other books previous to even these, all of them written 25 years in the past, during the 1950s; but as we examined in more detail during my review of Ramona and Her Mother, it's almost two different characters we're dealing with in the schism between the '50s and '70s books, in that the Ramona of the first run was only four years old and mostly existed as the same kind of "agent of chaos" comic foil as Henry Huggins' pet dog Ribsy did during his own series of boy-oriented adventures in those years. In a remarkable development, though, as a grandmother in her sixties, in the 1970s Cleary reapproached this character 25 years after she first made her famous, inspired by the rise of "social realist YA" in those years best typified by Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and aged Ramona up into a tween so she could have the kinds of confusing real-life tween experiences that Blume famously recorded herself in her Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing in these same years. (For contemporary readers feeling a little lost, all these books we're talking about today are highly similar in nature to Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series; still as light in tone as books for smaller kids, but now examining the growing realization of the complex adult world that tweens start having between the ages of eight and twelve, when they first become aware of things like how their parents are humans like anyone else, and therefore make mistakes and have problems like everyone else.) As I was talking about in my review of Ramona and Her Mother, I've generally found these '70s Ramona titles to be really lovely, a chance for Cleary to grow and mature as an author at a point in literary history when the children's genre would support such a thing, all the more surprising for it happening in Cleary's sixties when by all rights she should've been enjoying a well-deserved retirement. But here by the early '80s, you can clearly see her starting to run out of steam, not coincidentally as she entered her seventies and now her fourth decade in a row of being a publishing writer; this one's a little slower than the rest, a little more pat, a little less funny, a little less daring. Ramona is thoroughly a tween at this point, now much more self-aware and not nearly the butter-chomping princess of Discordia she was as a bratty adolescent; and it's no surprise, I think, that Grandma Cleary felt the obligation to shoehorn in a brand-new divine imp to now take up that space (Ramona's bratty adolescent neighbor, Willa Jean Kemp). Having the book end with Ramona suddenly having a brand-new little sister feels like an apt and loving coda to the entire 31-year saga, a full-circle moment where Ramona suddenly becomes Beezus and now the next generation of authors will write the ongoing saga of new bratty hellion Roberta Quimby. Of course, as we know, Cleary didn't stop here, but in fact wrote another six children's books and two full-length volumes of memoirs before she finally hung up the pen in 1999, at the age of 83 (and then living all the way to 104). It's here in her octogenarian years that she racked up pretty much any of the negative reviews she ever had; and we'll be looking at that in more detail in the next Cleary book I review, 1983's Newbery-winning but awfully cheesy Dear Mr. Henshaw. The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
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| 1732543224
| 9781732543225
| 1732543224
| 5.00
| 3
| unknown
| Oct 19, 2020
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it was amazing
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I'm happy to say that this book I helped edit as a freelancer is now available in bookstores! It's volume two of an ongoing chapter-book series for tw
I'm happy to say that this book I helped edit as a freelancer is now available in bookstores! It's volume two of an ongoing chapter-book series for tweens, and tells what I think is a really engaging fantasy story that combines Monk's dual lives as both an African national and an African immigrant living in the US. Dark yet funny and with a refreshingly original viewpoint, one that relies as much on African storytelling traditions as it does magical kids, it comes strongly recommended to all 8- to 12-year-olds, as well as their parents.
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Mar 25, 2021
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| 1934169234
| 9781934169230
| 1934169234
| 3.89
| 23,233
| 1885
| Oct 18, 2006
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really liked it
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The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #10: A book on your "one day maybe get around to reading" list I find it fascinating that, whe The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #10: A book on your "one day maybe get around to reading" list I find it fascinating that, when author Frances Hodgson Burnett was alive, her fans didn't have even the slightest doubt that 1886's now forgotten Little Lord Fauntleroy would go on to become the most famous work of her career, given that it was undoubtedly so at the time; while the one book of hers that has had a remarkably long shelf life, 1911's The Secret Garden, was considered a mediocre trifle among her original audience, even to the point where most obituaries written after her 1924 death didn't mention the book at all. That says a lot about the changing nature of children's literature; because Fauntleroy is about as perfect an example as you can find of what for a long time was held as the most noble paradigm of the genre, that the best kids' books are the ones that portray children who behave in the way their book-buying parents wished children did, and not necessarily the way children actually do, which has been the new norm in the industry since the rise of the "Young Adult" category in the early 1970s. I mean, don't get me wrong, the book is freaking delightful, the main reason it's getting a high score from me. It's the tale of a minor noble in Victorian England, one so thoroughly unpleasant that it inspires one of his sons to literally move to America and turn his back on his family, devoting his life instead to social justice issues before tragically dying in middle-age; so when through a series of circumstances it's revealed that the late lord's own seven-year-old son is the next in line to inherit the grumpy old earl's titles and estate, it comes as a shock to everyone involved, not least of which is the chatty, bubbly, perennially optimistic little boy Cedric himself. And therein lies the rub; for as an adult, I was thoroughly charmed by Cedric's eternal enthusiasm for life, his precocious behavior, and his total, complete, 100 percent pollyannaish dedication to always look on the bright side of life, which needless to say melts the curmudgeonly old earl's heart and gives him a new enthusiasm for human existence. But sister, if I had read this in grade school when I actually was Fauntleroy's age, the amount of furious eye-rolling that would've occurred would've been strong enough to knock the Earth off its orbital axis and bring an end to the entire space-time continuum. That's the problem in a nutshell with these kinds of centuries-old children's stories, that they're not designed for actual children at all; or I guess I should say that their adult authors mean for them to teach children how to be better people than they are, in fact to hold up a platonically ideal standard for "childhood" that no real child in existence could ever live up to, but in no way were designed to reflect the actual fears, hopes and joys of the actual child audience who were reading the books. So as a 51-year-old, I found the book hilarious and enchanting, precisely because Burnett was writing the book specifically to entertain me, the dude with the wallet who's actually in charge of buying the books my children will eventually read. And that's why children's literature remained a shrug-worthy anomaly for so long, and one of the big reasons it exploded in popularity a mere twenty years after the first attempts in the '70s by authors like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars to write realistic, naturalistic stories that mirrored the actual struggles and triumphs of the kids reading them, not the idealistic parents holding the pursestrings; and it's the exact reason that Burnett's own The Secret Garden (featuring a lot more self-sufficiency and self-motivated agency among the child characters) has in the 21st century become so profoundly more popular than Fauntleroy which, despite being as popular during its own times as the Harry Potter books are to ours (among other things, it's the book that gave us the Buster Brown suit, which forever changed the way society thinks about dressing toddlers), was mostly that way because of well-meaning parents who wished their kids were more like the little lord, not because of kids who saw themselves reflected in him. Although it was fun as a 21st century adult to read, in no way at all would I recommend this as a contemporary children's tale worthy of the time of most contemporary children. ...more |
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Oct 19, 2020
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| 0064402452
| 9780064402453
| 0064402452
| 3.77
| 3,997
| Jun 12, 1986
| Sep 01, 1988
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it was ok
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After a recent re-read of one of my favorite children's books of all time, Robert C. O'Brien's 1971 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (my review), as p
After a recent re-read of one of my favorite children's books of all time, Robert C. O'Brien's 1971 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (my review), as part of the 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge I created (join us!), I learned that in the 1980s, O'Brien's daughter Jane Leslie Conly wrote a pair of authorized sequels, so on a lark I thought it'd be fun to read both of those as well. Unfortunately, though, at least when it comes to the first sequel, 1986's Racso and the Rats of NIMH, the reason you haven't heard of it is because it's simply not very good, and is a fine example of the almost indefinably ephemeral differences between mediocre children's literature and the all-time classics. Conly's guilty of several problems here at once, including the fact that the story mostly just trades on callbacks to the superior original, which always makes for a flat sequel; and that she dumbs down the entire story level altogether, taking an original that was mostly peopled by adult characters and that was aimed towards the very smartest tweens of the bell curve, and delivering a sequel that now concentrates on a bunch of child characters who act like petulant little toddlers (think for example of Elmo's relationship to the rest of the Muppets on Sesame Street), which dishonors the fact that the original is so fondly remembered precisely because it's written at a high level that will challenge most of the 8-to-12-year-olds it's meant for. Then there's the fact that, after deliberately making the original characters act in the naturalistic, true-to-life way that real animals actually do in the real world (due to O'Brien being a decades-long contributor to National Geographic), giving the first book a kind of dazzling verisimilitude you often don't see in this genre, his daughter finally gives in and makes them the cutesy little anthropomorphic cartoon creatures you typically see in this genre's more mediocre titles. (In the sequel the animals wear tiny little human clothes, use tiny little human utensils, and have human-style bureaucratic jobs, such as the crows now being the de facto postal carriers of the animal world.) And then finally, for as much as Conly dumbs down the entire rest of the book, she then ratchets up the climax to an insanely complicated and unbelievable degree, in which the rats learn that a computer-controlled dam currently under construction is to wipe out the secret valley where they now live, so in six months go from never having seen a computer to all becoming veteran coders of PASCAL (mind you, without ever actually touching a computer themselves), so that they can sneak into the dam, load their virus software, and have the dam blow itself up without the humans realizing that the intelligent rats had anything to do with it. (Compare this to the technological climax of the first book, in which the rats use a pulley and rollers to move Mrs. Frisby's cinderblock nest two feet from its previous location, which while still clever and impressive feels much more like something that rats could actually accomplish.) The whole thing is just a really bad slap in the face to the intelligent, charming original, so much so that I'm now not even going to read the third book in the series, even though I checked it out of the library at the same time. For aging Gen-Xers like me who are looking for a stroll down Nostalgia Lane, I recommend stopping at the end of the original and not bothering with these sequels at all. ...more |
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| 0451528824
| 9780451528827
| 0451528824
| 4.31
| 1,009,069
| Jan 01, 1908
| May 06, 2003
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it was amazing
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This is one of the public domain books I read through DailyLit.com, a service that breaks famous novels up into thousand-word chunks and then emails y
This is one of the public domain books I read through DailyLit.com, a service that breaks famous novels up into thousand-word chunks and then emails you a chunk once every morning; and I frankly only took it on just to say that I had read this famous 1908 children's tale once before I died, but not really expecting too much out of it. So that's what made it such a surprise, then, to learn that this book is freaking hilarious, not in an asterisked "hilarious for little girls in 1908" way, but in an actual, modern, really-will-make-you-laugh-out-loud sense. The key of course, as anyone who's read the book can tell you, is in Montgomery's wily, complex heroine, an 11-year-old Canadian orphan who is mistakenly sent to an elderly couple's house after they instead requested a teenage boy to help them tend their farm, but whose crazily creative mind, loving earnestness, and cartoonishly self-righteous stubbornness ends up (eventually) winning over every person she meets. This alone is interesting, but by itself wouldn't have made the book the treat it is; what really seals the deal is author Montgomery's natural understanding of witty, Simpsons-like humor, transforming Anne from what would've otherwise been just another bratty Edwardian-Age goody-good into a literal personification of the Imp of the Perverse, her clever mannerisms drawn by Montgomery in such sharp, clear detail that you can't help but burst into laughter at the visual image of this gangly redhead actually acting that way in the real world. (Just for one example, perhaps my favorite image in this entire novel is the Valentine's Day when a male classmate, trying to make up for an earlier slight, gives Anne a candy heart, which Anne then accepts while smiling, then while maintaining eye contact with the boy the entire time, drops on the floor and grinds into powder with the heel of her shoe.) That's what makes this book such a charmer, that Montgomery had the skills as a writer to portray her protagonist's idiosyncrasies in such a concrete way as to make her feel completely real and like she's standing right in front of you, a feisty yet true-hearted girl who you can imagine in modern times growing up to be that hilariously cynical computer-coder or punk-bassist friend who always drinks too much at your parties and ends up trending on Twitter the next day. It's no wonder that generation after generation of young independent girls continue to see themselves reflected in our obstinate hero; and I have to say, I loved this so much that I'm seriously thinking of taking on some of the other eight books of the complete Anne series, a decades-long storyline that stretches all the way into the lives of Anne's eventual daughters. It comes strongly recommended for one and all, perhaps one of the few times in my life that I can say such a thing about a century-old children's book without needing to add air quotes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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May 14, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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Paperback
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.78
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.75
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.95
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.92
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Oct 27, 2023
not set
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Oct 27, 2023
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Apr 03, 2022
not set
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Apr 03, 2022
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| 3.94
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2021
May 23, 2021
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May 23, 2021
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2021
not set
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May 23, 2021
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2021
not set
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May 23, 2021
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| 3.88
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liked it
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Apr 06, 2021
not set
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Apr 06, 2021
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| 3.78
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it was ok
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Apr 2021
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Apr 01, 2021
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| 4.08
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liked it
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Apr 2021
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Apr 01, 2021
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| 5.00
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it was amazing
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Mar 25, 2021
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Mar 25, 2021
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Oct 19, 2020
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Oct 19, 2020
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| 3.77
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it was ok
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Oct 11, 2020
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Oct 11, 2020
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| 4.31
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it was amazing
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May 14, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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