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2021 reads, #22. 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.

Today's book is from the end of Cleary's career, published in 1991 when she was 75 years old, and there's no other choice but to admit that her age is quite clearly showing here, the work of a deeply elderly woman who at that point had not only grown-up children but now grown-up grandchildren, with 38 books now under her belt and for very understandable reasons was simply running out of steam as a creative writer. It's not so much that this book is bad -- it's yet another chapter-book for tweens about the genteel adventures of a kid slightly older than them, which like we examined in Ramona and Her Mother is the product of Cleary's late-career turn into "social realism YA," inspired by peers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, making this as much about the anxiety and loneliness issues of our hero Leigh Botts (he of the previous book I most recently reviewed, 1983's Dear Mr. Henshaw) as it is about the random dog he comes across at the beach one day and eventually adopts, the same plot as Cleary's very first book (1950's Henry Huggins, also reviewed as part of this series) but now with a darker and more melancholic tone.

No, the problem is that, just like anything that was once daring but then was co-opted by everyone else once it became popular, child audiences were growing weary by the '90s with these kinds of "Cassavetes for Kids" stories; and I don't think it's any coincidence at all that a mere six years separates this book from the publication of the first "Harry Potter" volume, a new changing of the guard just as necessary and paradigm-changing as Cleary's own changing of the guard back in the years after World War Two, in her case from the weepy wish-fulfillment Dickensian Victorian tales that were the norm for children's literature at the time. That doesn't make Strider an objectively bad book in hindsight, but certainly it was a story type that had been played out by the time it was published; and after its disappointing results both commercially and critically, the world would have to wait an entire additional decade and a half before the ascendancy of Cleary and Blume's spiritual inheritor, John Green of The Fault in Our Stars fame. This should all be kept in mind before approaching it yourself, an interesting book from a historical perspective but definitely not the one to start with if approaching Cleary for the first time.


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)