Today, we lost one of kid lit's many luminaries who had a sense of reality that many people can identify with.
Beverly Cleary, creator of the Ramona and Henry Higgins series has died at the ripe old age of 104 on March 26th US time.
(Photo: Oregon Public Broadcasting)
As we pull up on the end of International Women's Month (or Women's History Month for our American readers), we have lost one of the many powerful and influential female writers whose stories have inspired countless authors and whose characters were loved by generations of readers around the world. I'm talking about the legendary Beverly Cleary.
I was very shocked to see her go, as I had loved her books about Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins and many others. I was one of the many kids who were moved by her works as they were quite different from other books I had read before.
It was at school during a so-called "book drop" event when someone left in a book entitled "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" and I had ran into the name "Beverly Cleary" before, when one of her books was featured in my textbook materials. Then I realized that this is probably one of the most recognizable names in children's literature.
Then I soon realized that her writing style has become what makes her a household name in that field.
She was born in McMinnville, Oregon, USA, in 1916. In this piece for the LA Times, Cleary had a very wild imagination. She had read many of the literary classics of her day and was inspired to write a short piece for a school assignment. All these adventures in her world had inspired her to become a librarian. Her family began to struggle financially as a result of the Great Depression, so her library stint was her only way of making ends meet. This struggle would later be reflected in in her writing.
She would go on to spend most of World War II working in the library and would constantly get this question from kids who frequent the library: "Where are the books about us?" That because kidlit at that time was too inundated with fantasy or westerns.
LEFT: One of the many characters Cleary created was the ever-beloved Ramona Quimby, who would become the star of eight books and a feature film starring Selena Gomez
(PHOTO: HarperCollins Publishers)
To solve the problem of lacking real-life stories, she started creating her own universe of characters living in an ordinary suburb, and that suburb was also inspired by Cleary's childhood, all of them living experiences that real kids experience day-to-day, all that to help kids start their way to love reading, and to appeal to readers who have grown tired of the same old fiction.
That universe was Klickitat Street, and the inhabitants there include Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby. They both belong to two ordinary families and live in a plain, vanilla suburb. But underneath the mundane setting lie stories that have resonated for years to come.
RIGHT: Of all of Cleary's characters, Ramona Quimby is the most popular of them, spawning eight books and even a feature film
(PHOTO: HarperCollins Publishers)
What I liked about the Ramona series was that it reflected reality in a way that I had never read before. Her experiences are real but also funny.
The Ramona series reflects upon her growing-up years and all the best (and worst) life experiences as she grew up. From having a bad hair day when her class was to be photographed to following the hardboiled egg fad in her school only to realize her egg was raw and all these other shakeups in her life including losing her pet cat, fights with older sibling Beezus, having a younger baby sister, and when the family struggled as her father was unemployed, she dreamed of being in a commercial and making and keeping a new friend.
You see, the mishaps and struggles experienced in Ramona's life seem to reflect our own struggles and failures as well as how we deal with them and how we never seem to forget them. The family ties in every book are very heartfelt and they feel like your family.
A scene from the feature film "Ramona and Beezus" starring Selena Gomez.
(PHOTO: 20th Century Fox/Walden Media)
These themes have helped Cleary make a name for herself, allowing Ramona to star in several books over a span of four decades and even spawning a feature film in 2010, titled Ramona and Beezus, starring Selena Gomez in her Disney Channel heyday. It very much condensed the books into one single storyline which perfectly reflects the spirit of the books and Cleary's heart of realism.
To be honest, I admire Cleary and how down-to-earth her writing seems to be. No hero vs. villain battles, no alternate universes, no magical, whimsical features. Just a very pure slice of life with a touch of love and some family bonds.
This goes to prove that even just the simplest stories of life, unfiltered can be very resonant, stand the test of time, and can really help kids learn to read as they can identify with the characters and their shortcomings. We've all had an eraser thief or a cat we lost or a bad picture day at some point in our lives.
And not to mention, Cleary's endearing real-life descriptions would go on to inspire generations of writers to do the same kind of realistic stories. Judy Blume had the same kind of writing in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing about ordinary kid Peter and his mishaps and family events and the iconic Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret about a girl questioning growing up, family, and religious matters. Jeff Kinney would also do the same, making comical tales of Greg Heffley in the Wimpy Kid series and Raina Telgemier putting in real-life tales in comic form with the Smile series. All of them may not exist if it weren't for Ramona Quimby and Beverly Cleary.
She may be gone, but her books and influence on modern kidlit will never be forgotten and will always have a place in my heart.
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