The grand finale is Ramona’s birthday party in the park, complete with a cake frosted in whipped cream. This year Ramona is trying to improve her spelling, and Cleary is especially deft at limning the emotional nuances as Ramona fails and succeeds, goes from sad to happy, and from hurt to proud. Cleary picks up on all the details of fourth grade, from comparing hand calluses to the distribution of little plastic combs by the school photographer. Her older sister Beezus is in high school, baby-sitting, getting her ears pierced, and going to her first dance, and now they have a younger baby sister, Roberta. Ramona returns (Ramona Forever, 1988, etc.), and she’s as feisty as ever, now nine-going-on-ten (or “zeroteen,” as she calls it). Hays’s artwork is wistful and idyllic, just as this day is for one small boy.
After a snack, they work their way homeward, racing each other, doing a dance step or two, then “Dad takes my hand and slows down./I understand, and we slow down./It’s a long, long walk./We have a quiet talk and smile.” Smalls treats the material without pretense, leaving it guileless and thus accessible to readers. Putting first things first, they tidy up the house, with an unheralded sense of purpose motivating their actions: “Then we clean, clean, clean the windows,/wipe, wipe, wash them right./My dad shines in the windows’ light.” When their work is done, they head for the park for some batting practice, then to the movies where the boy gets to choose between films.
It’s not melodramatic, but just a Saturday in which an African-American father and son immerse themselves in each other’s company when the woman of the house is away. There is something profoundly elemental going on in Smalls’s book: the capturing of a moment of unmediated joy. (glossary, author’s note, bibliography) (Fiction.
Readers will cheer as the truth sets Rachel free, and as she, against all odds, becomes a doctor and returns to Africa to rebuild the hospital where her father healed patients before her. Though it bogs down with the rehashing of Rachel’s internal dilemmas and in African animal metaphors, the story remains irresistible in a The Prince and the Pauper or The Secret Garden sort of way. The up-until-now somber novel blooms as the orphaned Rachel shares her newfound grandfather’s passion for bird watching and bonds with him despite her reluctant impersonation. In this satisfying story set in the early 20th century, the money-grubbing Pritchards swap the unassuming 13-year-old Rachel for their spoiled daughter Valerie when Valerie dies, manipulating her into traveling to England to pose as the rich, elderly Mr. Little does she suspect that the loss of her own British missionary parents to influenza will leave her to the wicked clutches of the neighboring Pritchards. Raised in British East Africa, Rachel knows well that when parents die, their young are vulnerable to attack.
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