The First Read - Harriet: The Spy
February 14th 2011 07:44
After spending a lovely Sunday morning cleaning the apartment, enjoying the sound of the ice melting outside (finally!), folding laundry, and swiping my roommate's new speakers to properly christen them with a little AC/DC and Metallica, I feel I'm ready, at long last, to work on some of my writing projects. First and foremost being; my review of Harriet: The Spy.
It begins with a child. A young girl bent over a tree root in the mud, trying to teach her best friend how to use his imagination.
It doesn't go well.
Yet this scene is still a delight and not only introduces us to a character who's head is churning with uncontainable ideas and thoughts, but to a state of mind we may have forgotten over the years. We see Harriet M. Welsch utilizing a traditional composition notebook to keep track of everything she thinks. She is hardly discerning with her opinions - she doesn't believe anyone will ever see what she's written - and it's this blase disregard for the feelings of her friends and classmates that ultimately brings her trouble.
Harriet: The Spy was written by Louise Fitzhugh and published in 1964, yet despite it's almost 50 years, it still has a timeless atmosphere that pulls multi-generational readers in decade after decade, as exemplified with the 1996 movie adaptation starring Michelle Trachtenberg.
I'll admit I had difficulty getting into the story right away, though not for lack of a good beginning. It's been a long time since I've read anything written for the children's literature genre, and the writing style took longer to get accustomed to than I expected. Still, it was all kinds of refreshing. I found, as I read, that I was dancing around the outskirts of a kind of immersive reading I hadn't experienced since I was still a child. I could remember how impressionable I had been then, and was able to recognize those passages and scenes in the book that I knew would have stuck out to me when I was younger.
There is a scene in particular where Harriet is preparing to make the rounds on her Spy Route, an activity she takes part in almost every day with all the seriousness of a full time employee. She dons her favorite pair of ratty, worn-out jeans and assembles her tool belt, complete with hand-made pouch for her notebook, loop for flashlight, leather case for pens, a water canteen, and a boy scout knife. She puts on lensless glasses and takes off for her usual spy spots.
I just know that if I had read this when I was six or seven years old, I would have immediately put together my own spy belt and darted around the house, recording imaginary goings-on in a notebook of my own. I spent very little time in my own house, as it were. I was constantly traversing in laundry-basket carriages pulled by The Little Sister, climbing Couch Mountains and scaling Dad'sFavoriteRecliner Peak, catching Pokemon in the hallways, galloping through the Great American MasterBedroom, and battling Scar at the top of Pride Rock Stairs. All of those happenings constitute some of my favorite memories, and none of them would have returned to me so readily were it not for Harriet: The Spy's dose of nostalgia.
Harriet herself, while incredibly intelligent, is far from the ideal child and is not a character I could have identified with when I was younger. In fact, my unreasonable fear of conflict at that age might have had me cringing from the book with a sour-pinched face due to the nature of the ending and Harriet's seemingly endless nonchalance towards the feelings of her classmates.
But I'm not trying to give my 8-year-old self's opinion.
Harriet: The Spy is a smart book about doing what you love and doing it for the right reasons. Harriet is allowed to put her talents to good use at the end of the book; her gifts haven't been quashed, but rather steered in a healthier direction by her parents and given room to grow. To be useful to others.
I suppose I'll need to set up some sort of rating system for my reading list this semester. I like stars as much as the next guy, but there's got to be something else that speaks "excellence" that can pertain to literature. Or I could just make up a word. Like Murkadoo. Or I could use one of my favorite authors of all time in a sort of respectful dedication toward his literary genius: Patrick Rothfuss.
Or better yet, Rothfuss' baby, which he lovingly refers to as 'Oot' on his blog. Oot is adorable. And I believe can serve as a sufficient method of measuring excellence.
So there we go. Each book I read this semester can earn a maximum of 5 Oots.
>>>>Harriet: The Spy gets THREE OOTS out of FIVE.<<<<
Next up: A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Harriet: The Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
It begins with a child. A young girl bent over a tree root in the mud, trying to teach her best friend how to use his imagination.
It doesn't go well.
Yet this scene is still a delight and not only introduces us to a character who's head is churning with uncontainable ideas and thoughts, but to a state of mind we may have forgotten over the years. We see Harriet M. Welsch utilizing a traditional composition notebook to keep track of everything she thinks. She is hardly discerning with her opinions - she doesn't believe anyone will ever see what she's written - and it's this blase disregard for the feelings of her friends and classmates that ultimately brings her trouble.
Harriet: The Spy was written by Louise Fitzhugh and published in 1964, yet despite it's almost 50 years, it still has a timeless atmosphere that pulls multi-generational readers in decade after decade, as exemplified with the 1996 movie adaptation starring Michelle Trachtenberg.
I'll admit I had difficulty getting into the story right away, though not for lack of a good beginning. It's been a long time since I've read anything written for the children's literature genre, and the writing style took longer to get accustomed to than I expected. Still, it was all kinds of refreshing. I found, as I read, that I was dancing around the outskirts of a kind of immersive reading I hadn't experienced since I was still a child. I could remember how impressionable I had been then, and was able to recognize those passages and scenes in the book that I knew would have stuck out to me when I was younger.
There is a scene in particular where Harriet is preparing to make the rounds on her Spy Route, an activity she takes part in almost every day with all the seriousness of a full time employee. She dons her favorite pair of ratty, worn-out jeans and assembles her tool belt, complete with hand-made pouch for her notebook, loop for flashlight, leather case for pens, a water canteen, and a boy scout knife. She puts on lensless glasses and takes off for her usual spy spots.
I just know that if I had read this when I was six or seven years old, I would have immediately put together my own spy belt and darted around the house, recording imaginary goings-on in a notebook of my own. I spent very little time in my own house, as it were. I was constantly traversing in laundry-basket carriages pulled by The Little Sister, climbing Couch Mountains and scaling Dad'sFavoriteRecliner Peak, catching Pokemon in the hallways, galloping through the Great American MasterBedroom, and battling Scar at the top of Pride Rock Stairs. All of those happenings constitute some of my favorite memories, and none of them would have returned to me so readily were it not for Harriet: The Spy's dose of nostalgia.
Harriet herself, while incredibly intelligent, is far from the ideal child and is not a character I could have identified with when I was younger. In fact, my unreasonable fear of conflict at that age might have had me cringing from the book with a sour-pinched face due to the nature of the ending and Harriet's seemingly endless nonchalance towards the feelings of her classmates.
But I'm not trying to give my 8-year-old self's opinion.
Harriet: The Spy is a smart book about doing what you love and doing it for the right reasons. Harriet is allowed to put her talents to good use at the end of the book; her gifts haven't been quashed, but rather steered in a healthier direction by her parents and given room to grow. To be useful to others.
I suppose I'll need to set up some sort of rating system for my reading list this semester. I like stars as much as the next guy, but there's got to be something else that speaks "excellence" that can pertain to literature. Or I could just make up a word. Like Murkadoo. Or I could use one of my favorite authors of all time in a sort of respectful dedication toward his literary genius: Patrick Rothfuss.
Or better yet, Rothfuss' baby, which he lovingly refers to as 'Oot' on his blog. Oot is adorable. And I believe can serve as a sufficient method of measuring excellence.
So there we go. Each book I read this semester can earn a maximum of 5 Oots.
>>>>Harriet: The Spy gets THREE OOTS out of FIVE.<<<<
Next up: A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
| 30 |
| Vote |
Add Comments
