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Title: Ribsy by Beverly Cleary
Details: Copyright 1964, Scholastic Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Henry Huggins's dog, Ribsy, is hopelessly lost in a huge shopping mall parking lot. It's raining hard, the pavement is slick, horns are honking, and drivers are shouting. When Ribsy thinks he has found the Hugginsess' new station wagon at last, he jumps in the open tailgate window and falls asleep, exhausted. When he wakes up to find himself in the wrong car, lots of little girls pet him and make plans to give him a bath. All Ribsy wants to do is go home to Henry. Instead, he's about to begin the liveliest adventure of his life."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I mentioned in my last review about my history with Beverly Cleary and how her books helped shape my childhood and in rereading some old favorites this year, I discovered several I hadn't read.
How I Liked It: The last new Beverly Cleary book I read (The Mouse and the Motorcyle) felt like a deviation from what I'd come to know as Cleary's work. Not an unpleasant deviation by any means, but strange. Ribsy, on the other hand, feels just like the Cleary I remember.
Ribsy does not talk (to humans, anyway) and while his adventure is fanciful and unlikely, it's still within the realm of possibility for a dog. He doesn't even (spoilers?) do what real life dogs have done and travel a long distance to find his way back to his people. And much like with Socks, we're with him all the way and every action so common to dogs (squirming away from certain kids, not liking certain smells, wanting a tasty treat) Cleary adds her signature charmingly relatable element. Ribsy frequently warring against his (dog) instincts while on an adventure is both funny without being cloying and genuinely fun to read.
The book has a few dated passages but nothing to really take a modern reader too far out (and kids can tell when they're reading an old book and expect some things to be dated). It is over fifty years old, after all.
I'd also feel remiss if I didn't mention the 1000 Black Girl Books campaign of a few years back by then-11-year-old Marley Dias, where she explained the necessity of the campaign was brought home by her exasperation at constantly being assigned books in school about white boys and their dogs, a surprisingly dense genre (she didn't mention Ribsy or its 1954 predecessor in the Henry Huggins books Henry and Ribsy, but she was assigned Where the Red Fern Grows, Shiloh, and Old Yeller).
And you can see that too easily, such books (if not specifically those, than the ones they inspired) fit into a kind of trope about coming of age, which the dog serving as a plot device, and the problem that necessitated the campaign is the fact that very specific coming of age is too frequently all that's presented.
While the Henry Huggins series is indeed about a white boy and occasionally his dog, Cleary true to her fashion keeps sentiment and character growth subtle and there are no ham-fisted attempts to assign meaning to the ordinary. Ribsy, at least in this book, doesn't appear to represent anything to the children he encounters other than a fun dog.
All in all, it's easy to see why this book stayed a classic. While I praise Cleary's more fantasical work, her more "down-to-earth" stories will always feel more like home to me. They also are a better showcase for her talents as writer, since it's not an easy thing to find the amazing in the ordinary and the relatable in the extraordinary. And yet she's been doing it for decades and there's a reason why her books stick with children where other ones do not. That's why some classics stay classics.
Final Grade: A
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