Milo Groot is the editor of the school paper at Sebastian Barth’s school. Milo is something of a social outcast at school, but after he gets extremely ill eating in the school cafeteria, Sebastian and his friend David begin to wonder if there’s been some foul play. Although everyone thinks it’s just a bad case of the flu at first, it’s strange how Milo’s symptoms only come up after eating lunch at school.
Milo recently wrote an editorial for the school paper, criticizing a group of boys at school who have adopted kind of a “greaser” look, wearing leather jackets, smoking cigarettes, wearing temporary tattoos (so badass), and calling each other by biker-style nicknames. The biker boys, who like to call themselves the Devil Riders (they don’t actually have motorcycles, but they like to stand around and look at pictures of them a lot), have been kind of mean to other kids, even former friends, but the school’s principal says that there’s no school rule against simply wearing leather jackets, so there’s nothing he can do about their biker persona. Milo starts up a petition against them, though, trying to get the principal to crack down on their little group. Could one of them be behind Milo’s poisoning?
Then, suddenly, two more kids at school get sick in the same way. The school cafeteria has always gotten good health ratings, leading Sebastian to think that whatever is harming people at school must be deliberate. Soon, whatever is harming the students affects a large part of the student body, with seventy-seven students all getting sick on the same day. But, still, who is doing it and what is their motive?
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The story gets somewhat philosophical about the nature of hurt and why people hurt each other. Sebastian asks his friend Corrie’s father, Reverend Wingate, for his opinion about why people hurt others. Sebastian’s grandmother thinks that people hurt others because of some hurt that they have themselves. This is part of the reason why the Devil Riders act the way they do. It is revealed that the leader of the little gang, Harley (not his real name, that’s his “biker” nickname) has a very unhappy home life that he often lies about to others. Acting tough with his friends and pushing other people around is his way of dealing with it. One thing that Reverend Wingate notes is that “There is no way for people to stop hurting one another except to stop.” He relates it to the arms race of the Cold War (contemporary with when the story was written), saying:
“If we justify building up our own arsenals because they have more weapons, then we only heap one folly on top of another. There comes a time when we must say, ‘Enough! I don’t have to have more toys than you. I don’t need the last word. I will turn the other cheek.’”
In other words, some battles aren’t worth fighting because the cost is too high, higher than the gains of victory, and in those cases, it’s better just to move on. In a way, both Sebastian’s grandmother and Reverend Wingate are correct; the villain that they’re looking for is someone who’s been harboring hurt for a long time and hasn’t yet realized the cost of getting revenge.
I found it interesting when Harley (who is not the villain, even though he is the primary suspect for a time) tells Sebastian that a person who is less popular than others is at a disadvantage when they do something wrong. Harley says that his social worker tells him, “. . . everybody makes mistakes. She says, you make a mistake on the blackboard, what do you do? You erase it and try again. I say to her, sometimes somebody writes on the blackboard with a magic marker, just to be mean, and everybody sees it and nobody can erase it away. It’s always there, and always will be the rest of your life.”
Popularity can make other people more willing to forgive a wider range of behavior, however I think that the situation that Harley describes is less a matter of popularity and more of method and intent. When someone does something “just to be mean,” it’s always going to leave a mark, at least emotionally, and “magic marker” isn’t meant to be erased, so it’s a bad choice for someone airing only temporary feelings. If he had chosen chalk, then yeah, whatever mean or rude thing he wrote would have been erased and forgotten, but Harley didn’t do that, and that’s his own fault. If his aim was to hurt people, he can’t legitimately complain that people got hurt because all that happened was that he succeeded in what he deliberately set out to do. He also can’t legitimately complain about lasting consequences when he deliberately chose a lasting form of inflicting that hurt. Some people just have poor priorities and bad strategy, and that’s what gets them into trouble. Harley is still blaming other people for his own bad choices, and he’s going to continue having problems until he realizes that he, and he alone, is the one responsible for the thing he does and only he can change what he decides to do.
That being said, some things that are apparently permanent aren’t really, if you know how to clean up after yourself and have the will to do it. You can even get permanent marker off of a chalkboard, if you have some rubbing alcohol. People have figured out how to do that because there are times when they’ve had the need to do it, and they tried ways to fix the situation until they found what worked. Life is like that. You can gripe about things being wrong and unfixable, or you can try ways of fixing things before you decide that they’re impossible to fix. People also appreciate people who make an effort. Harley needs to learn both how to behave himself in the first place and how to clean up after himself in the second. He could use a practical adult who understands how to fix things, and he needs to develop the mindfulness to keep himself from creating more problems to solve.
Before the story is over, Sebastian himself makes a big mistake, accusing the wrong person because he made a false confession. However, Sebastian is willing to face up to the apologies that he will owe others after he learns the truth, realizing that a false accusation was part of what the real villain was hoping for. Anger is also a kind of poison. Truth can hurt at first, but unlike poison, it can make things better.
It’s 1914, and Blossom Culp is just starting high school. Although the principal of her old school tells her that this is a chance for her to make a fresh start, it looks like Blossom’s future is going to be very much a continuation of her immediate past. In high school, she’s still a social outcast, looked down on by girls from better-off families, like Letty, the class president. Also, despite her principal’s assertion that Blossom’s previous forays into the occult were imaginary, the product of the mental confusion that accompanies puberty, and that she is bound to grow out of them, Blossom knows that her psychic abilities are a natural gift and will not be ignored.
Blossom begins high school friendless because Alexander Armsworth has been ignoring her lately because of his important new position as class vice-president, his infatuation with Letty, and his friendship with a couple of local hooligans, Bub and Champ. Alexander is looking forward to his role in planning the school’s Halloween Festival, telling Blossom that he’s over their earlier, childish occult escapades and the Halloween pranks he used to pull. Meanwhile, all of the other girls in school are infatuated with their handsome history teacher, Mr. Lacy, and so is the girls’ gym teacher, much to Blossom’s disgust. Blossom thinks that Mr. Lacy is full of himself and denies that she has any such silly crush on Alexander.
Blossom makes an unexpected friend in a girl called Daisy-Rae, a girl from the country who has brought her younger brother into town to attend school and hoped to get an education herself but has been too afraid of the big town to actually attend classes. Daisy-Rae hides in the school during the day and lives alone with her brother at night in the old chicken coop at the abandoned Leverette house. It is through Daisy-Rae that she learns that Alexander and his friends aren’t so above childish pranks as they claim to be. Blossom also discovers that Mr. Lacy has been romancing her old principal. Mr. Lacy isn’t quite what he appears to be and has some unsavory secrets in his past.
Matters come to a head when Alexander (at Letty’s urging) tries to persuade Blossom to dress up and become the fortune teller for the haunted house that the freshmen class is doing for the Halloween Festival. The haunted house is also a fundraiser, and Letty figures that they can get extra money from people if they’re willing to pay to have their fortunes told, and who would be better for the job than Blossom? However, Blossom isn’t one to go out of her way to please others, especially Letty, and it turns out that they’re holding the haunted house in the Old Leverette place. For some reason, that old house makes Blossom’s mother uneasy. She seems to think that it’s haunted, but in an unusual way. Blossom tells Alexander that she will not agree to be their fortune teller until he agrees to check out the house with her before Halloween and find out what’s wrong with it. She figures that, since both of them are psychic, they can learn what’s so unusual.
As Blossom learns, her abilities don’t confine themselves to the past and people who have died but extend to the future and the people who haven’t yet been born. Inside the Old Leverette house, Blossom suddenly finds herself entering the distant future, the 1980s. In the 1980s, the Leverette house is once again lived in, and Blossom meets a boy named Jeremy who is a lonely social outcast, like herself. Jeremy is a computer nerd, living with his divorced mother. He takes Blossom on a tour of their town as it is in Blossom’s future, much larger than it used to be and with many familiar landmarks missing. However, what Blossom sees in the future gives her the inspiration she needs to solve her problems in the past and hope that things will improve. In return, she also proves to Jeremy that he is far from alone and has had a friend for longer than he ever imagined.
The time travel to the 1980s comes off as being a little corny (or so it seemed to me), but the writing quality of the book is excellent. The author has an entertaining turn of phrase, and the book, like others in the series, is humorous and a lot of fun to read.
Besides being a kind of fantasy story, there are some interesting tidbits of history in the book, showing how people lived in the 1910s. Blossom explains about the things she and her classmates did at school, like wearing beanies on their heads to show which year they were (freshmen, future graduating class of 1918). At one point in the story, Blossom takes Daisy-Rae and her brother to their first movie, a silent film with an episode of The Perils of Pauline serial. While Blossom worries about the future, readers can get a glimpse of the past!
As for what Blossom learns about her own future, she avoids finding out too much because she’d rather not know the details. However, there are implications that she and Alexander may eventually marry and live in his family’s old house.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Laura and her twin brother, James, are practical children who are fond of useful facts, but still have imaginations and appreciate fantasy stories. In this part of the Tales of Magic series, all of the previous books in the series are fictional books that the characters have read and enjoyed, and real magic may or may not exist, as the title suggests. All throughout their coming adventures, the children are never quite sure how much of what happens is magic and how much isn’t, but they’re bound for an amazing summer.
Laura and James’s family has recently bought a house in the country, and the story begins with the twins taking the train to their new town while their parents follow in the car with their luggage and their baby sister, Deborah. Laura and James haven’t seen the new house yet, but they know that it’s pretty old, and they speculate if it could be haunted or maybe even magical, like something from a fantasy story. James doesn’t think so. He thinks that magic, if it existed, is a thing of the past. Then, a strange girl on the train tells them that magic does exist. She insists that her grandmother is a witch and makes a comment about how they should “drop a wish in the wishing well, and wait and see!”
Laura and James don’t know what she means, but it turns out that there is an old well on the property of their new house. James ignores it, but Laura can’t resist giving the wishing thing a try. After struggling to come up with something appropriate to wish for, she finally writes a note that says, “I wish I had a kitten” and tosses it into the well. The next day, when they meet the boy next door, Kip (short for Christopher), they find a basket with two kittens in it sitting on the edge of the well. Kip figures that Lydia found the note that Laura wrote in the well bucket and decided to make her wish come true by leaving a couple of stray kittens for her.
It turns out that the girl from the train is Lydia Green. Kip says that she lives nearby with her grandmother. Lydia’s grandmother is an artist, and both of them are eccentrics. Lydia is kind of a wild child who likes to spend her time riding around on her black horse. She’s something of an outcast in the community, and she knows it. When the other children go to see her to ask about the kittens, Lydia seems prepared for them not to like her and for her not to like them, either. However, when she finds out that Laura’s names for the kittens were inspired by the book The Midnight Folk, she warms up to them because she also likes fantasy stories, and Laura offers to share the magic of the well with her.
James is more skeptical about Lydia and insists that she prove that there’s magic around, if her grandmother is really a witch. Lydia is reluctant at first, but then she shows the other children her grandmother’s garden. She insists that one of the plants in the messy garden (which does look like it might belong to a witch) can bring visions when it’s burned and maybe even a visitor from another world. (Sounds trippy.) The others want to see it work, so they decide to burn some. Nothing happens, and when James demands to know how long they have to wait, Lydia gives a vague answer that it might not be the right time or that maybe she just made the whole thing up. James believes the second explanation, but Laura is willing to give Lydia (and magic) more of a chance.
The two girls bond over their shared love of fantasy stories, and Laura invites Lydia to come to their house the next day. The boys admit to Laura that they kind of like Lydia, although she’d be easier to get along with if she didn’t have such a chip on her shoulder. Kip says that she’s always like that, and that’s why kids at school don’t get along with her either. Even so, Lydia is an interesting person.
When Kip gets home, he finds more of the strange plant that Lydia burned growing around his house, and his mother tells him that it’s an ordinary wildflower. Still, the next day, something happens which makes it seem like Lydia’s notion that it “makes unseen things appear and seen things disappear” has come true – the old lawnmower that came with the house is now missing, and there’s a young tree on the property that wasn’t there before. Coincidence? Maybe, but Lydia had also said that it could “transform people so they’re unrecognizable overnight”, and suddenly little Deborah has a new, weird haircut. When Deborah happily announces that she’s been transformed by magic, James realizes that it’s a trick and that Kip arranged everything. Lydia is angry that Kip was playing a joke, but he says that it isn’t really a joke, that he just wanted to keep the game going. Lydia says that it isn’t really a game to her, although she finally admits that she left the kittens.
Laura turns on the boys and says that it’s obvious that Lydia only did those things because she wanted to make friends. Lydia tries to deny it at first, but then admits that it’s true, but that she is never able to make friends and that she doesn’t know how. Laura says that she is Lydia’s friend, and the boys are, too. James agrees, saying that he just likes “to get the facts straight,” but now that the facts are known, he hopes that they can all start over again. The children each apologize to one another for the awkwardness, and Laura says that she is a little disappointed that there isn’t any real magic.
This part could be a story all by itself, but, not so fast! Just as the children are making amends with each other, a strange woman comes up to them in a horse-drawn carriage, looking like a visitor from another world in strange, old-fashioned clothing. They ask her if she came because they wished for her, and she says it’s difficult to say, but wonders why they would think so. The children say that they were playing a game and wished for a visitor from another world. The woman says that, in a way, she is from another world. She says that when she lived in this same valley, when she was young, life was very different, so it’s like she has come from the past to the present. The woman, Isabella King, lives in a house by the old silver mine. She invites the children to come and visit her sometime to have some of her silver cake and see the old mine. After she leaves, the children debate whether Isabella was brought to them by magic, but James says that it doesn’t matter because it looks like they’re going to have an adventure, magical or not.
Isabella King really does like to live in the past, maintaining her house and the old, disused silver mine that her father left her in the way that she’s sure he would want them to be maintained. However, her house and mine are threatened when the bank announces that it will foreclose on the mortgage. The children badly want to help Miss King, so they decide to go see the banker, Hiram Bundy, about it and try to persuade him to give her some leniency. Before they go to see him, Laura decides to make another wish on the wishing well because, in spite of Lydia’s earlier confession, she thinks that the well still might be magic.
Hiram Bundy agrees to talk to the children partly because he enjoys Lydia’s grandmother’s paintings, but he tells them that money isn’t the only concern about Miss King. Her family has a reputation for getting “peculiar” as they get older, and people have voiced concerns to him that Miss King is no longer capable of handling her own affairs and that she might be better off living in a nursing home. The children angrily deny that Miss King is mentally incompetent, giving him some of the cake that Miss King had baked for them as proof that she is still capable of doing things. Miss King is an excellent baker, and Mr. Bundy admits that he is impressed. Lydia also finally speaks up about the way the people in town, including Mr. Bundy himself, look at her and other people who are eccentrics. Lydia’s grandmother is allowed to be eccentric because she’s a talented artist and people make allowances for her, but those same people look at Lydia as if she’s terrible just because she likes to spend time by herself, riding her horse around. Adults in town are always saying that she’s a disgrace and that “somebody ought to do something” about her just because she doesn’t like things that other people like and wants to live her own life, doing her own thing. It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with either Lydia or Miss King so much as some of the people in town simply don’t like them and the way they do things. Because they aren’t the town’s little darlings, they are unfairly characterized as being worse than they really are and ostracized. Mr. Bundy admits the hypocrisy, which he is also guilty of, and assures her that he will take responsibility and straighten things out with Miss King.
When the children later see Mr. Bundy having cake and talking with Miss King at her house, Laura remembers that part of her wish at the well had been that Miss King would have Mr. Bundy eating out of her hand, and once again, the wish seems to have come true, literally. Although it still isn’t positive proof that Mr. Bundy’s change of heart was due to the well’s magic, the children think it might have been. They start considering that perhaps the well came through for them because they were doing a good deed, and perhaps they ought to try to do the same for others, thrilling in the apparent power they have to change people’s lives.
Testing out their theory proves difficult at first because they have trouble finding another person with a problem for them to solve. At first, the only person who seems to want their help is the woman downtown who asks them to help with setting up for a local art show to encourage amateur artists. The art show is open to anyone in town, and the kids think that maybe they should enter it, too. However, the only art supplies that they can afford are paper and crayons, and only Lydia manages to draw something that’s any good. Lydia doesn’t particularly like her drawing, saying it’s just a doodle, but Laura stops her from throwing it away. Then, the clerk at the store asks them if the small boy in the store is their little brother. It appears that the little boy is lost, so they decide that their good deed for the day will be helping him to get home.
They do find the boy’s home, and he turns out to be the child of a wealthy family who wandered off while his nurse was talking to a friend in town and ignoring him. The nurse at first blames the children for kidnapping the boy when they come to return him. The boy’s father doesn’t believe that, but he does reprimand the children for taking all day to return him because they had wanted to find his house themselves with the help of the wishing well instead of the police and allowed themselves to be sidetracked with something else they had also wanted to do. In the end, the children question how much they really helped the “lost heir”, as they think of him, because he might have been found sooner without their interference. However, one good thing does come out of their adventures: Lydia wins a prize in the art contest because Laura entered her picture on her behalf.
Lydia (as Laura had expected) is at first angry that Laura entered her in the contest without her permission, but Laura explains to her that she’s realized something about Lydia: Lydia prefers to think that no one cares about her or will ever appreciate her because she fears their rejection too much to risk trying to do anything that might earn their approval. Laura points out that their interest in her art proves that people really do appreciate her. Lydia’s grandmother even apologizes for not realizing before that Lydia has artistic talent. Lydia is amazed because she never really thought of her doodles as being anything special before. Kids at school had always made fun of her “crazy pictures,” and her teacher had always insisted that she “paint from nature” instead of drawing what she really wanted to draw.
But, the children aren’t done with the wishing well yet. Mrs. Witherspoon, the head of the local garden club and self-appointed arbiter of all that’s right and what everyone should think and do, has set herself against the new school that is planned for the area. She doesn’t like the idea of more traffic, more kids running around, and the possible risk to property values. However, many families with children live in the area, and they really want the school for their kids. Mrs. Witherspoon has set herself against them because she’s accustomed to people simply agreeing with what she wants (often just out of habit). She’s one of the big voices that enforces conformity in their town. She’s so awful that the kids consider making a voodoo doll of her, but then, it occurs to them that she might be much worse if she were actually in pain instead of just busy being one. They decide maybe she really needs people to be extra nice to her in order to make her more agreeable, but she refuses to accept any of their gestures of kindness because she thinks that they just want money from her, and she calls them juvenile delinquents. Can the power of the wishing well do anything to change her mind? Or, do they really need it?
A surprising friendship with Mrs. Witherspoon’s son, Gordy, leads the children on one last adventure that may (or may not) involve a ghost from the past and answer the question of whether or not the wishing well is really magic (unless there’s another explanation).
All through the book, there are other explanations besides magic for everything that happens. In fact, the wishing well may not do anything aside from acting as a source of inspiration for the children. Mr. Bundy might have been influenced by the children’s arguments even without the well, but the well is what influenced them to become friends with Isabella King and try to help her in the first place. Similarly, Lydia was always talented in art; it was just that no one recognized it until Laura was inspired to enter her drawing in the art show. The strangest episode takes place at the end of the book, when the children supposedly meet the ghost of the woman who may have made the well magic in the first place, but even then, the children realize that the “ghost” may have been the work of someone else, perhaps part of a conspiracy on the part of the people they’ve been helping all summer. However, it’s never established one way or the other, so it’s up to the readers’ imaginations to decide.
Much of the story is about fitting in and finding friends. In the beginning, Lydia was the main outcast in the community, but it turns out that many others, including Gordy, in spite of his mother’s social status, don’t quite fit in, either. In fact, it seems that perhaps more people in town would have liked Lydia more and encouraged her in her art if she had ever felt confident enough before to let people really get to know her. However, here I have to say that it was really the townspeople’s fault for driving her away in the first place. For a long time, Lydia had lost confidence in other people and in her ability to make friends because of the way people treated her. That was why Lydia sometimes purposely acted strange and didn’t try to get people to like her; she was already pretty firmly convinced that they didn’t and never would. It was just the message that everyone seemed to be sending her, and it kind of turned into a vicious cycle that was pushing Lydia further and further away from other people. Lydia really needed intervention from a third party to end the cycle. When Laura accepts Lydia and convinces the others to accept her as well, it opens up new sides of Lydia’s character and new possibilities for her.
The drive that some people have to assert control over others, enforce conformity within a group, and maintain an “us vs. them” mentality with non-conformists is responsible for many social problems and behavioral issues. Mrs. Witherspoon is an example of this, although it turns out that even our heroes are somewhat guilty in the way that they view Mrs. Witherspoon’s son Gordy at first.
This book taught me a new vocabulary word, purse-proud, which is used to describe Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends. Basically, it means pride in having money, especially if the person lacks other sources of pride. Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends are all wealthier members of the community, which is why they feel that they’re entitled to dictate to others what they should do and how things should be. They think that because they have more, they know best. (I’ve seen this before, but now I have a new word to describe it.) Initially, Mrs. Witherspoon is unconcerned with how local children are educated because she’s wealthy enough to send her son to private schools. Other people’s needs are of no concern and possibly a source of inconvenience for her. Gordy is the one who changes her mind when he realizes that he has a chance at making real friends with the neighborhood kids if he goes to public school, like they do, and convinces his mother that it’s what he really wants. Although his family is pretty privileged, Gordy never really made any friends at the private schools that he has attended and has actually been rather lonely. In a way, Gordy receives the final wish of the wishing well (for this book, anyway) in getting the new friends that he has needed and learning that there are other, more imaginative ways to have fun than what he’s been doing.
Gordy is a nice surprise as a character. At first, he seems to be a kind of clueless trouble-maker, but his friendship with the other kids brings out better qualities in him. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the others’ acceptance of him encourages him to show more of what he’s truly capable of. When James and Laura are introduced to Gordy, he doesn’t seem very bright, and he does things he shouldn’t, like swimming in the reservoir instead of the river and throwing rocks at windows to break them just because he can. In some ways, the other kids are right, that Gordy is thoughtless and doesn’t behave well. However, when they end up agreeing to hang out with Gordy one afternoon after failing to win over Mrs. Witherspoon with kindness, they realize that part of the reason that Gordy acts the way he does is that no one ever suggests to him that he do anything different. Gordy lacks somewhat for positive influences in his life. His mother thinks that she knows best in everything but isn’t always aware of what her son thinks and feels. Other people try to avoid talking to Gordy because they see him as an annoyance or source of trouble, so no one explains to him how his behavior is keeping him from making friends. However, Gordy does have good points. Unlike Lydia, Gordy doesn’t seem to hold any grudges in spite of experiencing similar problems with fitting in and making friends. Even when the other kids are less than enthusiastic about hanging out with him at first, he still keeps trying to be friendly and is quick to forgive their earlier coldness. Gordy knows that he really wants friends and that part of the key to getting them is to remain open to the possibility of being friends, even when those friends aren’t perfect. In the end, he is really good at showing the acceptance of others that is part of the theme of this story. Acceptance of others and willingness to be friendly improves things for everyone.
Another thing that I really liked about this book is the children’s attitudes toward people’s conventional views of art and literature. Many people are eager to tell others what art or writing should be and how it should be done. Lydia said that people had criticized her drawings before for being “crazy” or not from real life. They couldn’t see the imagination and talent that it took to make them because they weren’t what people expected. Even Lydia’s grandmother complains about always having to paint scenes with maple trees in them because that’s what grows where they live. She’d rather paint something else, but people expect maples trees, so that’s what she paints. Kip says that he kind of understands because his teachers always tell him to “write what he knows”, but really, he thinks that the things he doesn’t know well are much more interesting. They all want the freedom to explore new ideas, and that type of exploration is what makes fantasy stories so interesting. There may be magic, and maybe not, but considering the possibilities is half the fun!
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The Best School Year Every by Barbara Robinson, 1994.
This year at school, Beth’s teacher has assigned everyone a year-long project to think about good points about their classmates, but it’s difficult when one of your classmates is Imogene Herdman. The Herdmans are generally awful. They lie, steal, set things on fire, bully other kids, and have been kicked out of almost every building in town for one reason or another.
Mr. Herdman deserted the family years ago, and Mrs. Herdman works long hours at the shoe factory, so the six awful Herman kids are left to do pretty much anything they want most of the time, even if what they want to do is to walk off with Louella’s baby brother Howard and draw pictures on his bald little head and charge other kids a quarter to see the amazing “tattooed baby” like some kind of sideshow freak. It’s difficult for the adults in town to tell them off because they never listen or punish them because no punishment ever seems to stick. Mostly, when the Herdmans are around, the adults seem to focus on damage control.
So, Beth struggles to find anything good to say about awful Imogene, the oldest girl in an awful family, but throughout the school year, Beth does begin to notice that Imogene does have other sides to her personality. The book is more of a collection of short stories about the Herdmans’ various antics and escapades and Imogene’s role in them than one single story as Beth thinks about the things Imogene does. Imogene can’t really be called “nice,” and she definitely causes her share of chaos, but she does have occasional moments when she’s helpful or does something in the name of justice, like giving her old blanket to Louella’s little brother to replace the one he lost so he wouldn’t be sad.
Some of Beth’s compliments to Imogene at the end are somewhat generic because Beth struggles to get around some of Imogene’s genuinely awful behavior, but when she considers what Imogene’s best trait is, she finds something that really captures Imogene’s spirit, a quality that Imogene genuinely admires and may lead her on to better things in her life.
This is the second book in The Herdmans Series. The books are funny because of the chaos that the Herdmans cause wherever they go, although you can’t help but feel a little sorry for them at times, too. It’s part of that awful dilemma when you think that someone deserves a good spanking for what they’ve done but, at the same time, you see that it wasn’t entirely their fault. While the Herdmans are responsible for the things they do, they’re also victims of neglect. Their parents aren’t really raising them, and the other adults have mostly given up on them. They do what they do because they can and because no one is there to make sure that they’re doing the right thing. No one even really expects them to do the right thing, so if they do something right, it’s completely up to them.
Beth’s observations about Imogene show that there is hope for her. Imogene has some good traits as well as bad ones, and occasionally, she does do good deeds as well as bad. Beth realizes that Imogene could do some great things in her life because of her resourcefulness (a quality that Imogene likes when Beth points out that she has it), but she realizes that what Imogene eventually turns out to be is still in her hands, whether she uses her abilities to rob banks or run for President. Adults will know that Imogene’s reality is likely to be something in the middle, but the point is that Imogene has more good points than it appears at first and more possibilities in her life than just being a trouble-making Herdman.
As in the first book in the series, there is also something of a contrast between Imogene and Beth’s friend Alice. Alice is the perfect child (at least in her mother’s eyes, and her mother lets everyone know it), but she is also often shallow, bragging up her looks, talents, and perfect behavior to get attention and feel important (which is what Beth thinks is really the best compliment to give Alice because it’s the one she would most value). When Alice is nice, it’s not so much because she is a nice person as she likes the praise she gets for doing it. Really, neither Alice nor Imogene are especially nice; they’re just not nice in different ways and for different reasons (although both have good points, too, which is the point of the story). When Alice gets a compliment, she sees it as merely her due for her perfection, but for Imogene, compliments come as a surprise because she doesn’t hear them much and she knows that she is far from perfect.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, actually).
The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp by Richard Peck, 1983.
The Best School Year Every by Barbara Robinson, 1994.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 