Review - Ribsy by Beverly Cleary

Short review: Ribsy gets lost, meets a bunch of people, has a lot of adventures, and eventually gets found.

Haiku
Henry Huggins' dog
Gets lost in a shopping center
Then wends his way home

Full review: Ribsy is the last of the books centered on Henry Huggins that Beverly Cleary wrote, although, as the title suggests, it doesn't really center on Henry, but rather centers on his dog Ribsy. In the story, Ribsy gets lost and has a series of adventures as he tries to find his way home. After the first chapter, Henry mostly appears in short vignettes at the beginning of each chapter as the book details the efforts made by Henry and his parents to find their wayward hound. Meanwhile, Ribsy bounces around the small city, encountering person after person who is taken in by his muttish charm.

One of the most notable facts about the book is that it was written in 1964, and it shows. The world depicted in its pages represents a reality of childhood, pet ownership, and the treatment of animals that simply no longer exists. Ribsy is routinely allowed to run free in the Huggins' neighborhood, so much so that the instigating event in the book is caused by him racing for blocks after the family station wagon dodging traffic in an attempt to join Henry and his parents as they drive to the local shopping mall. Once there, the family leaves Ribsy alone in the car for hours while they go off to shop - Henry having taken off his collar so the dog could scratch at a troublesome flea.

After getting out of the car by accidentally rolling down the window, Ribsy finds himself disoriented and unable to locate the correct car. Eventually, he jumps into a car that he thinks is correct, only to discover later that he was sadly mistaken when the automobile's owners return. Thus begins Ribsy's extended travels as the Dingley family decides to simply bring this strange dog home with them as an afternoon diversion for their many children. From there, Ribsy's life becomes a series of vignettes as he travels from one usually well-meaning person to another. He goes from a violet-scented bubble bath administered by the gaggle of Dingley children, to a comfy existence with the elderly Mrs. Frawley, to a hectic week spent living as a mascot for Mrs. Sonchek's second grade class, to an exciting afternoon at a high school football game concluding with a trip to Joe Saylor's house, and finally a sojourn at the apartment building occupied by latchkey kid Larry Biggerstaff.

There is something distinctly idyllic about the world Cleary presents. Ribsy, despite being what amounts to a stray for more than a month, is never bothered by an animal control officer, never runs across someone who turns him in to an animal shelter, never encounters a person who wants to abuse him, or does more than simply say "shoo" to get him to move on. He never goes hungry - the only complaint really registered by Ribsy concerning food is that he is sometimes reduced to eating cat food or other things he finds less than appealing. For the most part, however, Ribsy runs across little old ladies who feed him stew, children who are more than happy to give them half of their bagged school lunches, or people at sporting events who gladly hand over so many pieces of hot dog that Ribsy can turn down ones that have too more mustard than he likes on them.

A mildly interesting wrinkle of this book is that Cleary uses it as a means of introducing the reader to characters that don't fit the typical moderate middle-class residents of Klickitat Street. The Dingleys only appear in the book for a short time, presenting a raucously chaotic family with more children than any of the families featured in Cleary's other books, Mrs. Frawley is an older single woman, clearly widowed, retired, and lonely, while Joe Saylor's family is lower middle-class and obviously much less well-off than the Huggins' (or the Quimby's). Finally, Larry Biggerstaff lives in an apartment with his single working mother, left alone all day so she can wait tables at a nearby café. In short, it seems like one of the motivating impulses for writing the book was Cleary's desire to show an array of people from all walks of life in her fictionalized Portland, giving the reader a window into a wider world of people who might not be quite as blessed as her usual characters.

Ribsy should not be mistaken for anything resembling incisive social commentary. All that Cleary does in the book is point to a couple of impoverished children and say "these people exist in the world", with no real discussion as to why a boy like Joe Saylor would feel the need to beg his way into a high school football game and scrounge the bleachers afterwards looking for lost change, or why Larry Biggerstaff's mother would be in a position where she left him alone all day to sit on the front steps of an apartment building, not even having enough money to buy her son a ball to replace the worn-out one he owns. Even so, in a media environment that was pushing programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet as the standard vision for American families, presenting an array of families diverging from those models seems like a revelation.

In the end, Ribsy is a children's book that delivers a fun story for kids with just a bit of an edge to keep adults entertained. Throughout the pages, Ribsy manages to both be somewhat anthropomorphized and still clearly a dog, with doggish sensibilities: Viewing the world through scent, confused by unfamiliar people and places, and confounded by things like unaccommodating bus drivers and fire escapes. Despite being more than sixty years old, the book kept my eight-year old enraptured, and she eagerly anticipated each additional chapter. Even so, the resolution of the book is not really much of a mystery - my daughter predicted the ending quite early in the book - although the fun is in exactly how the story gets to what is the somewhat obvious conclusion. In short, this book is a fun romp that comes packaged with just a little bit of insight, and is certainly worth reading for almost every child.

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