![]() ![]() Ramona is ordinary, headed to her ordinary public elementary school with a new dress and mussed hair. ![]() Nothing remarkable happens to her, no one notices her particularly, nor does she have the power to make her own magic. Oh, there are a few other female figures in the canon of early childhood-Pippi Longstocking, Charlotte the spider-but Ramona is a plain girl in the suburbs. Ramona has endured as only a handful of other storybook characters have-the Grinch, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan. I vividly remember reading the Ramona books as a child with my mother in the 1980s, and over the past few years I’ve been reading them again, some of them several times through, to my own daughters. ![]() But with the publication of Ramona the Pest, we finally saw the world through her eyes. We had met her in a few previous stories featuring older kids, pestering Henry Huggins and her sister Beezus since Cleary’s first book in 1950. Or rather, this was our introduction to her story: 1968 marked the publication of Ramona the Pest, Beverly Cleary’s winsome first book from the perspective of her new heroine. It was the first day of kindergarten, and “she was a girl who could not wait.” She was simply unable to contain her excitement to get started with the morning. Fifty years ago, a five-year-old Oregon girl sang and skipped through her living room, urging her mother onward-though, she protested defiantly, she was not pestering. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |