Sharing Is Caring: Introducing My Kids to Ramona Quimby

 

Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary

Mark the date on the calendar—my daughter and I read our first real chapter book together! And it was a Ramona book. Does it get any better than that?

Ramona Quimby is probably Beverly Cleary’s (the famed children’s book author’s) best known character. Ramona is precocious, funny, and perhaps the most frustrating younger sibling of all time. As a book character, she is delightful.

Beezus and Ramona is a classic. While it is the first book about Ramona, it is actually attached to her older sister, Beezus’s, point of view. Beezus is nine years old and often straddled with looking after Ramona, who is four years old. Beezus is the neat, sensible sister, and Ramona is the noisy, troublemaking, attention loving sister. Beezus finds that life with Ramona is often unfair, because Ramona always seems to get her way, even when, especially when, she does not deserve it.

Take, for example, in the opening scene, when Ramona is riding her tricycle indoors and playing the harmonica, making Beezus absolutely wild—the only way to get her to stop is to do what Ramona wants to do. How will Beezus be able to put up with her exasperating sister?

Each new chapter is a new adventure, and through each one, the reader sees not just Ramona’s wackiness, but also Beezus’s resilience.

Would I teach this book? Given the opportunity, absolutely! I have loved Beverly Cleary’s writing since I was very young and am happy for the opportunity to read it to children or use it in a children’s literature course. Cleary’s sense of humor and imagination in Beezus and Ramona is just as brilliant now as it was when it was first published, nearly seventy years ago.

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