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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 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)