#dear mr. henshawe

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: YA/Children's Literature Round-Up (May-December 2022)

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary (1983): Leigh Botts keeps up a years-long correspondence with children's author Mr. Henshaw, which becomes an important outlet after his parents divorce and he has to move to a new town with his mother. This is the book that won Beverly Cleary the Newberry Award, and frankly it's like when Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor for The Revenant instead of The Wolf of Wall Street. Cleary was a legend, but she excelled most at lower-stakes childhood (and sometimes adolescent) drama, like being bad at cursive, not owning enough cashmere sweaters, or (at worst) worrying because your father lost his job. This is still a sweet, sensitive problem novel, yet I feel like Judy Blume or Betsy Byars would've pushed it to the next level.

The Snow Angel by Suzanne Weyn (1996): In the eighth volume of a middle-grade series about four girls who are friends with angels, rich girl Molly is devastated when her boyfriend dumps her for hippie-dippy Christina. She distances herself from her loved ones, almost relapses in her recovery from anorexia, and ignores the gigantic snow-angel-turned-tourist-trap on her other friend Ashley's horse farm. Luckily, her dad just brought a catatonic Irish boy into their house! Can Molly help herself by helping him? I bought this book for a dime because it looked completely ridiculous, and it delivered on that front. I really didn't like any of the girls except for Molly, and with her it was mostly just the sympathy I'd have for any troubled teenager.

The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney (1881): In a small New England town, widowed Mrs. Pepper and her five kids (Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie) must work hard to keep their spirits up in the face of grinding poverty, measles, and monkey-related shenanigans. I made several gos at reading this book as a child, but always lost steam after the Peppers made friends with the wealthy King family. Little Emily was right on the money, because this classic is just not very good, especially after the rich folks start helping out. It's beyond treacly and only a few of the episodic chapters have a good amount of tension. Polly's almost-going-blind-from-measles-and-eldest-daughter-syndrome arc is still great, though.

Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle (1989): Sheltered fourth-grader Hillary forms an unlikely friendship with her neighbor, outcast sixth-grader Sara-Kate, after the older girl claims to have elves in her backyard. I had to read this book for school in fourth grade and I did not like it. I felt like it was trying to lure me in with something fun (magic, miniatures), only to never deliver and hit me with the actual sad topic (poverty and mental illness of a parent) instead. I stand by my elementary-school opinion. The good version of this novel is Daphne's Book by Mary Downing Hahn (if you want to read about an average girl befriending the class outcast before losing her to Social Services) or Lucie Babbidge's House by Sylvia Cassedy (if you want to read about a troubled girl getting lost in the arguably magical miniatures sauce).

Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher (2008): Working at a meatpacking plant to support her arthritic widowed mother and little sister in early-1940s Chicago, pretty, scrappy teenager Ruby Jelinski takes a chance and becomes a dime-a-dance girl at the recommendation of a handsome neighborhood hoodlum. I read this book at some point in high school and vaguely remembered liking it, but this time I was blown away. Fletcher packs a mind-bogging amount of character development and historical detail into a fast-paced story that ventures into some unexpected territory. It's maybe one of the best historical novels I've ever read.

Mitch and Amy by Beverly Cleary (1967): Nine-year-old twins Mitch and Amy don't always get along, but, if an outsider messes with one of them, he better be prepared for double trouble. Class bully Alan Hibbler learns this to his sorrow. This is the kind of cute slice-of-life story that was right in Cleary's wheelhouse, although it's not her most memorable. There are lots of sweet moments between the twins; for example, Amy gets Mitch an exciting book from the library when he's sick because she senses it'll help him with his reading struggles, and Mitch goes to bat for her when the dreaded Alan spits in her hair. I do think it would've been ideal if Mitch had also done something to help Amy with multiplication, for the symmetry. Also, I can't believe I missed the beginning-of-the-late-1960s California setting. These are some Joan Didion babies.

Cleopatra: Daughter of the Nile by Kristiana Gregory (1999): Her older sister wants to kill her, her father is a severe alcoholic, and she's stuck living in Rome with a bunch of gross old men who don't take her seriously, but teenage Cleopatra doesn't let that keep her from learning and adapting. This is one of the Royal Diaries I didn't read as a kid, and I really enjoyed the characterization of Cleopatra, who's resilient, clever, curious, and conflicted about her thorny family relationships.

(The Snow Angel, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and Cleopatra: Daughter of the Nile were all first-time reads; the rest were rereads.)

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[tmczz]

I'm deep in my Pedro Pascal crush and only now found out he's narrated a bunch of books?? BRB going to listen to that luscious voice for hours on end

[forthegothicheroine]

The 1984 novel Dear Mr. Henshaw predicted the rise of social media, where readers can ask their favorite authors questions, and those authors can give ridiculous responses.

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

You don't need 70+ episodes of a podcast to teach you how to write good. All the advice you need was already laid out in Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr Henshaw when she said that you needed to read, look, listen, think and write.

[celebrateeachnewday]

Artist Jane Crowther

My 2024 Booklist

Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland The Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods The Last List of Mabel Beaumont by Laura Pearson The Color Purple by Alice Walker Maskerade by Terry Pratchet (#18 of Discworld) The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey The Rainbow Trail by Zane Grey The Great Gatzby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Coraline by Neil Gaiman The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman Always Running by Luis J. Rodriguez The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones Murder Most Royal by Jean Plaidy A Man Called Peter by Catherine Marshall

[glowing-disciple]

Reading List - 2025

Currently Reading:

Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt by Robert A. Armour

Future Reading:

Adventures in Cryptozoology Vol. 1 by Richard Freeman

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Always Running by Luis J. Rodriguez

Ancient Mysteries, Modern Visions by Philip S. Callahan

Anne of Green Bagels by Susan Schade and Jon Buller

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

The Anti-Mary Exposed by Carrie Gress

The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle

The Art Nouveau Style by Stephan Tschudi Madsen

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Clearly

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

The Blade Itself by Joe Ambercrombie

The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Carmilla by Josphen Sheridan Le Fanu

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Champions of the Rosary by Donald H. Calloway

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft

Cranfod by Elizabeth Gaskell

Cubism by Guillaume Apollinaire

Dancing with Siva by Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

Dark Journey Deep Grace by Roy Ratcliff

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

Evolution by Nowell Stebbing

Expressionism by Ashley Bassie

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by Hal Johnson

Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

Freaks on the Fells by R. M. Ballantyne

Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter

Fundamentals of Character Design by Various Authors

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

Good Hunting by Theodore Roosevelt

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miquel de Cervantes Saavedra

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Humorous Ghost Stories by Various Authors

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Illuminated Manuscripts by Tamara Woronowa

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Javelin Program by Derin Edala

Joan Miro by Joan Miro

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Light of the Western Stars by Zane Grey

Living by the Sword by Eric Demski

The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Otis Spofford by Beverly Clearly

Pat of Silver Bush by L. M. Montgomery

Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Return of the Thief by Megan Turner

The Shining by Stephen King

Show Me God by Fred Heeren

The Silmarillion by J R R Tolkien

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Strange Love by Ann Aguirre

The River by Gary Paulsen

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Things My Son Needs to Know About the World by Fredrik Backman

The Third Man Factor by John Geiger

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Walking Practice by Dolki Min

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

We Are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories by C. Robert Cargill

The Weiser Field Guide to Cryptozoology by Deena West Budd

The White Mountains by John Christopher

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

[bethanydelleman]

Concerning Miss Grey and her insistence on marrying Willoughby, my theory is that the sheer size of her dowry suggests it is derived from trade. And not yet in quite the same sanitized, invested-in-funds-let's-buy-an-estate way that Bingley money is.

In which case Willoughby, who is a landed gentleman, no matter how tiny his estate, is a reasonable marriage partner for her. Could she go higher still? Yes, and then be looked down upon all her life for her birth.

Willoughby, on the other hand, is still a step up socially, allowing her to quit her sphere, but he's not so high that it would invite sneers. He also has good prospects via his temporarily offended aunt. So Miss Grey advances socially, gets two estates and a husband with a solid lineage who will be easy to force into a favourable marriage settlement and should, in theory, be grateful to be saved and put back into his aunt's good graces.

Is he the best option? Perhaps not. But he's also young, handsome, not diseased (that we know of), affable and it won't be so hard to tie his hands.

Now, the lady who should be fending off suitors if she ever had a season is Anne de Bourgh. Seriously, she can do way better than Darcy, Lady Catherine!

This question relates to this question.

You are totally right that Anne de Bourgh would be beating off suitors with a stick, if her mother ever put her on the open market so to speak and if she's strong enough to wield a stick.

Now for Sophia. There is a good chance she's from trade since Mrs. Jennings knows her aunt, and Mrs. Jennings's husband was in trade:

“Fifty thousand pounds, my dear. Did you ever see her? a smart, stylish girl they say, but not handsome. I remember her aunt very well, Biddy Henshawe; she married a very wealthy man. But the family are all rich together. Fifty thousand pounds!"

The problem with Willoughby's prospects is that when Sophia marries him, Mrs. Smith has disinherited him, so they do not have a reasonable expectation too get Allenham. Willoughby is only a man with six or seven hundred a year from Combe Magna. Mrs. Smith forgives and reinstates Willoughby after he marries:

Willoughby could not hear of her marriage without a pang; and his punishment was soon afterwards complete in the voluntary forgiveness of Mrs. Smith, who, by stating his marriage with a woman of character, as the source of her clemency, gave him reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich.

Which is why I speculate that what Sophia really wanted was power over her husband.

I guess another possibility is that Sophia enjoyed Willoughby's lifestyle. She actually has the money to live very fashionably and Willoughby does despite not having the wealth. So together they can live the high life.

[jesuisgourde]

listen listen listen i am reading Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton right now and i am halfway through and it is so fucking good like so so fucking good. please read it, it's so amazing. it's a novel about being an obsessive fan of a band (in this case, a fictionalized version of the beach boys) and also a novel about being trans and also a novel about alienation/loneliness and the ways in which transness exacerbates that rut but also how to get out of it and it's so fucking good.

it was pitched to me as a novel that asks "what if brian wilson of the beach boys was actually a trans woman?" and i was basically sold at that but it's so much more than that because it's that question from the point of view of a trans woman who's an obsessive fan of this fictional band with a long lost final album and it's told through letters she's writing to the leader of the band sort of dear mr henshaw-style recounting the story of the band and then also her own life and her desire to find the band leader who vanished from public eye after the band broke up and the fact that it becomes an actual possibility when the leader's granddaughter shows up at her workplace by chance one day.

anyway i'm not doing it justice just read it, it's so good.

[marceltheshellwithflipflopson]

i wanted a short audiobook to listen to while i crocheted and so i randomly downloaded beverly cleary's dear mr. henshaw and when i tell you i SCREAMED when i heard it say "narrated by pedro pascal" what a fucking delightful surprise

[shootingstar-scuderia]

💌 - i’m gonna do a whole bunch of this in one, just so i’m not completely filling in your inbox 😭

what made you want to start writing? 

if you could go on a hot lap with any driver, current or retired, who would you go with? 

do you listen to music or have any songs that get you into the mood to write?

thank you for sending me these questions! i loved answering them

1. what made you want to start writing?

I guess the answer to this depends on how far back you want to go. I started writing f1 fic because I was so gripped with how much history all the drivers had with each other. I'm coming out of a big bout of writers block and with them the words came so easily so it was just like a really reassuring return to form. If you want to go back to when I first started posting, my first fic was directly to ao3 (bruce wayne x reader) and the reason I started writing to post was really just because people told me i was good at writing. A couple years before that I won my school's writing award (real low stakes but extremely validating to a middle schooler) and had a couple of teachers who really liked my poetry. So from that point on I started writing to share and not just writing for myself. But the reason I started writing at all is due quote that I swear is from Beverly Cleary but I can't find the source of (I think it's from one of her books Dear Mr. Henshaw but i can't be sure). It's about how some people become readers and then some readers become writers and I read that when I was younger and was like, 'well maybe I should try this out.' and i guess the rest, as they say, is history.

2. if you could go on a hot lap with any driver, current or retired, who would you go with? 

this one is so hard because there are a lot of past drivers that i woudl like to sit and talk to but not necessarily go on a hot lap with if that makes sense? Like i would be so scared out of my mind and embarrassed that I don't think I could ever do a hot lap with any kind of racing icon. One of the younger current drivers for sure. Maybe Oscar or Logan ngl. They both seem like they'd find my fear really amusing but they won't be gremlin-y about it like I could see lando or charles being.

3. do you listen to music or have any songs that get you into the mood to write?

Sort of? Songs, the lyrics especially, are really what inspire my writing so if I listen while writing I get way too distracted with new fic ideas. Recently I've been inspired by a lot of trixie mattel music loll

[le-fils-de-lhomme]

I'd honestly love a faithful kids movie adaptation of Dear Mr. Henshaw.

[wyomink]

Dear Mr Henshaw,

[kontextmaschine]

(I already read Maniac Magee, The Giver, Dear Mr. Henshaw, Bridge to Terabithia, and The Whipping Boy in childhood)

[retropopcult]

Beloved children’s author Beverly Cleary has passed away, just a few weeks short of her 105th birthday.

Beverly Atlee Cleary (née Bunn; April 12, 1916 – March 25, 2021) was an American writer of children's and young adult fiction. One of America's most successful authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in 1950. Some of Cleary's best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse.

The majority of Cleary's books are set where she grew up, in the Grant Park neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.  She has been credited as one of the first authors of children's books to figure emotional realism in the narratives of her characters, often children in middle-class families.

She won the 1981 National Book Award for Ramona and Her Mother and the 1984 Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw. For her lifetime contributions to American literature, Cleary received the National Medal of Arts, recognition as a Library of Congress Living Legend, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the Association for Library Service to Children. The Beverly Cleary School, a public school in Portland, was named after her, and several statues of her most famous characters were erected in Grant Park in 1995.

Cleary was an only child and lived on a farm until she was six years old, when her family moved to Portland.  The adjustment from living in the country to the city was hard for her, and she found school challenging; in first grade, her teacher placed her in a group for struggling readers. Cleary said, "The first grade was separated into three reading groups—Bluebirds, Redbirds, and Blackbirds. I was a Blackbird. To be a Blackbird was to be disgraced. I wanted to read, but somehow could not." With the help of a school librarian who introduced her to books she enjoyed, Cleary caught up by third grade and started to spend a lot of time reading and at the library. By sixth grade, a teacher suggested that Cleary should become a children's writer based on essays she had written for class assignments.

After high school, Cleary went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1938. She also met her future husband, Clarence Cleary, during her time at Cal. The couple eloped and were married in 1940.  During World War II, she got a job as a librarian at the U.S. Army Hospital in nearby Oakland.  Working with children, Cleary empathized with her young patrons, who had difficulty finding books with characters they could identify with. After a few years of making recommendations and performing live storytelling in her role as librarian, Cleary decided to start writing children's books herself, and in 1942, she became a full-time writer. 

[gone2soon-rip]

BEVERLY CLEARY (1916-Died March 25th 2021,at 104).American children’s story writer,best known for creating the characters of Beezus and Ramona Quimby,Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsey,and Ralph S Mouse,and for writing the 1984 juvenile epistolary novel,Dear Mr Henshaw,which won her that years literary award,the Newbery Medal. Her children’s stories were especially noted for their attention to daily life of children growing up in middle class families.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Cleary