I really enjoyed the Ramona Quimby books when I was little, but somehow they never entered the list of children’s books I felt the need to repurchase as an adult, or even to reread.<\/p>\n
Until I read A Newbery Halloween and an excerpt from Ramona the Pest was included. I needed to reread them! The desire was very sharp, and it was all I could do to stop myself from popping on amazon and buying the whole set. I may yet do that, but the library has taken the edge off.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, I’ve never actually read all of them, just the 4 or 5 that my home library had and that I was able to search out.<\/p>\n
Henry Huggins (Henry-Ramona #1)<\/b>
\nCrazy completist that I am, I had to start with Cleary’s first book, though Ramona shows up in it only for a couple of pages and says approximately 4 words. Henry Huggins is an episodic book about an elementary school boy who lives in small town Oregon in the middle of the 20th century. His adventures in this book center around his pets and school. Aside from the amazingly low prices for everything, the book doesn’t feel dated at all — in spite of being a depiction of childhood 60 years ago. Its quality goes a long way to explaining why it’s still in print. For anyone with an Audible subscription, I believe Neil Patrick Harris reads the audiobook. Bonus.<\/p>\n
Henry and Beezus (Henry-Ramona #2)<\/b>
\nThe second installment of the Henry Huggins series sees the Quimby sisters taking a larger role. Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby is a girl in Henry’s class who also happens to live nearby, and she and he are friends, though he often wonders if it’s really worth it to be friends with a girl. Ramona, who is about four, he does not really care for, finding her pretty useless. The adventures in this book are very similar in tone to the first, and it’s just as engaging as the one that came before.<\/p>\n
Wicked Appetite (Diesel #1)<\/b>
\nJanet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series has been humming along for many years now. For several of those years, a bonus book was released in the late winter — a ‘between the numbers’ novel which featured Stephanie and this otherworldly character Diesel. Based on a survey of the Plum readers I know (under ten), most of them disliked the intrusion of Diesel and his strange magical adventures into the Plum series, which is supposed to take place in the real world. Evanovich has now spun Diesel off into his own series. I was somewhat nervous about this, as the Diesel books weren’t my favorite either, but I’m pleased to report that Diesel works much better in his own setting. If you’re going to have magic, then you shouldn’t have it intruding into a series where most of the time there isn’t any. It looks to me like the plans are for a seven book series which so far has the action centered around Salem, MA. I will be reading them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really enjoyed the Ramona Quimby books when I was little, but somehow they never entered the list of children’s books I felt the need to repurchase as an adult, or even to reread. Until I read A Newbery Halloween and an excerpt from Ramona the Pest was included. I needed to reread them! The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1071,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions\/1071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}