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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Review - Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary

Short review: Henry is an ordinary boy who lives on an ordinary street who finds an ordinary stray dog and has adorable ordinary adventures.

Haiku
A boy and a dog
Living on Klickitat Street
In six fun chapters

Full review: Henry Huggins was Beverly Cleary's first book, written after she spent years as a librarian struggling to find books to recommend to young boys. The book recounts the adventures of Henry Huggins, an eight year old boy living in an unnamed town in the Pacific Northwest as he, among other things, finds a dog, has an unexpected fish explosion, catches worms to pay off a debt, and tries to clean up his messy pet for a dog show. This book doesn't chronicle big events that change the world or recount pivotal moments in people's lives. It is simply stories about an ordinary boy with an ordinary dog living on an ordinary suburban street doing ordinary things. It is also wonderful.

The format of the book is fairly straightforward. There are six chapters. In each chapter, Henry finds himself confronted with a problem that might plausibly face an eight-year-old boy living on Klickitat Street and he solves it in a reasonably plausible yet humorous manner using little boy logic. Sometimes he gets a little help from his friends, and other times he gets a little help from his parents. Each chapter is more or less self-contained - this book isn't really a novel, but is rather a series of sequential short stories that use many of the characters and the same setting but are only loosely connected otherwise.

The six chapters are: Henry and Ribs, where Henry finds a stray dog and has to figure out how to get him home from his trip downtown on the municipal bus. The complication is that the municipal bus doesn't allow dogs and Henry has to get home before dinner. In chapter two, Gallons of Guppies, Henry buys a pair of guppies that soon turn into a half dozen guppies, and eventually hundreds, ultimately occupying pretty much all of the jars Henry's mother intended to use for canning fruits and vegetables. Pretty soon produce comes into season and Henry has to figure out what to do with hundreds of guppies now that his mother needs her jars back. In chapter three, Henry and the Night Crawlers, Henry loses his neighbor's football and has to figure out how to get the money to get him a new one, and sets about industriously capturing worms for another neighbor who wants to go on a fishing trip.

One interesting element to the book is that Ribsy becomes more important to the stories the further one gets into it. He's the focus of the first chapter, but in the second and third chapters he's not really all that important to the story. In the fourth chapter, The Green Christmas, Ribsy is responsible for the accident that gets Henry out of an unwanted role in Henry's school's annual Christmas pageant. The fifth and sixth chapters - The Pale Pink Dog and Finders Keepers - are pretty much all about Ribsy. In The Pale Pink Dog, Henry enters Ribsy in a dog show and after Ribsy gets dirty in the middle of the show, Henry resorts to some rather humorous means of trying to cover up the mud. In Finders Keepers an older boy shows up, having seen Ribsy in a picture from the dog show of the previous chapter, and says that Ribsy is actually named Dizzy and that before Henry found him in the drugstore in the first chapter, he had belonged to the boy and he had come to get him back. Essentially, as the book progresses, Ribsy becomes a more integral part of each chapter, which serves as a subtle means of showing how the dog becomes progressively more ingrained in Henry's life.

The other notable element of this book is that it now serves as a somewhat unintentional snapshot of the world of 1950 America, which made it more interesting for me, but may serve to make it somewhat less than engaging for younger readers. The most obvious marker is the technology in the book - early in the book Henry must make a telephone call to his mother using a pay phone and he has to stand on a telephone so he can speak into the wall-mounted transmitter, a situation that would probably be almost entirely alien to any child born in the last decade. The other plot element that makes the stories show their age is the comparatively extreme freedom that Henry is given by his parents. In the opening chapter, the eight-year-old Henry has taken the municipal bus downtown after school so he could swim at the YMCA and has stopped off to buy himself an ice cream cone before he takes the bus back home. Henry makes this expedition on his own, and the reader is informed that this is a weekly practice for him. While tweens using a bus to get around is probably still commonplace, children as young as Henry is supposed to be almost certainly do not any more. Throughout the book, Henry's parents practice what can more or less be described as benign neglect when it comes to supervising Henry, allowing him the freedom to get himself into trouble on a regular basis, and then expecting him to solve whatever problem he has created for himself pretty much on his own. It is almost impossible to imagine that any suburban middle-class American child of today being given as much free reign, as much responsibility, and as much leeway to work his way out of difficulties as Henry is given in this book.

Despite its somewhat dated nature, or possibly because of this, Henry Huggins remains a delightful book. Originally intended as a book about an ordinary boy doing ordinary boy things and written for ordinary boys to read, age has made it into a snapshot of the Americana of a bygone era as idealized by time and distance. Regardless of its unintentional time capsule status, this book remains a perfect way to introduce children to Beverly Cleary's world of books, and is an almost must read for a complete childhood.

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Review - 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire by Greg Stones

Short review: Ninety-nine stormtroopers join the Empire. Then they all die.

Haiku
Many stormtroopers
Die in lots of funny ways
And then, the Death Star

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is an absolutely adorable little Star Wars-themed picture book. The book opens by introducing the ninety-nine stormtroopers who have joined the Imperial forces, and the succeeding pages show how, in groups from one to thirty-six, they meet their demise. The various deaths are played for humor, with the troopers dying from a variety of causes that will be fairly recognizable to anyone who has seen the Star Wars movies. The entire book is illustrated in a cute, kind of whimsical style, with cartoonish and somewhat surprisingly (given the violence inherent in many of the deaths) bloodless artwork.

The entire book has kind of the same tone as Ed Gorey's Gashleycrumb Tinies, mirroring it somewhat with the creative ways the stormtroopers die. It is also somewhat reminiscent of the old children's song Ten Little Indians, especially since the book keeps a running account of how many stormtroopers are left as each page goes by. One the other hand, such comparisons aren't entirely accurate. Unlike Gorey's Gashleycrumb work, there is no rhyme to the text, and unlike both of the aforementioned works, there is no apparent pattern to the forms the stormtroopers' deaths take or how many stormtroopers die per page. I suppose the fact that the deaths are so completely random is part of the joke - disposable stormtroopers dying in completely unpredictable ways highlights the casual, almost offhand manner in which the characters in the movies treat these fatalities.

One question that comes to mind when reading this book is exactly who is its intended audience. At first, one might think that this is a cute Star Wars book aimed at young children, but I suspect it really wouldn't work for them. The "jokes" are really only funny if you know what the author is alluding to: "One stormtrooper fails to shoot first" isn't really funny unless one has seen the cantina scene from the original Star Wars (and followed the ensuing controversy as the scene was cut and recut in various editions of the movie). "Two stormtroopers think the security droid is on their side" is really only funny if you have seen Rogue One. And so on and so forth. The problem is, kids who are still in the "picture book" stage generally won't have latched on to the Star Wars movies yet - they are just too young to appreciate them, at least in my experience. Some of these sorts of works, such as Darth Vader and Son, work as humor even if one doesn't really get the references. They are enhanced when one knows what the author is alluding to, but that is unnecessary for the enjoyment of the book. Without the references, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is just a bunch of guys dying creatively, and that's probably not all that interesting. I can only surmise that the true intended target for this book are people who grew up on the film series who want something cute they can put in their infant's nursery because it looks cool to have it there, or possibly leave on the coffee table as a conversation piece.

Overall, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is a cute little book that delivers exactly what one would expect. Ninety-nine stormtroopers enlist, and then amusingly die as a result of a combination of the Empire's callous indifference and their own ineptitude. The book is not really much more than silly fun, but it is fairly clever silly fun, chock full of Star Wars references that are used to humorous effect. This book is unlikely to change anyone's life, and probably won't occupy anyone for more than ten or fifteen minutes, but it will be a joyful and goofy ride while it lasts.

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