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2021 reads, #16. 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.

One of the big surprises I've learned about Cleary from this exercise is that back in the '50s when her career was first taking off, she wrote not only the Klickitat Street chapter-book series that she's now largely remembered for, but a whole series of "young romance" novels designed specifically for teenage girls, with this one being the first of a string of books with such provocatively '50s titles as The Luckiest Girl and Sister of the Bride. And indeed, this book is as delightfully dated as the Klickitat books are elegantly timeless, all poodle skirts and drugstore milkshakes and ducktailed boys with fintailed cars. It's quite clearly the reason these books were largely forgotten during the countercultural age of the late '60s (the last of Cleary's "young romance" books was published the exact month and year of Kennedy's assassination), and never rediscovered by further generations the way her books for younger reasons have perpetually been since then; but still, there was something delightful about reading this and being reminded that these kinds of stories used to be published all the time without even the slightest trace of irony, even if one such book of this type was way more than enough to satisfy my curiosity for the rest of my life. If they're to be read at all, they should be read in this forgiving, nostalgic spirit, an age when picking the right chiffon dress for the coming sock hop was what the American arts thought was the most pressing concern for the average teenage girl.

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)