There’s the unexpected twist of humor that arrives when her parents and sister burst into laughter.
There’s the incredible and clear-eyed portrait of Ramona’s anger, a rubicon scene that comes after several chapters of escalating tension and disappointment. “‘I’m going to say a bad word!’ she shouted with a stamp of her foot.” Her parents, duly warned, fall silent, waiting for Ramona to produce her horrible statement. The kid who began her school year full of vivre and creativity has become subdued and furious, and when her mother reads aloud a subpar report card, Ramona finally cracks. Plus, deep down, there is a fear so terrible she almost can’t say it to herself: She thinks her parents love her elder sister Beezus more than they love her. Her parents have worked hard to build a new addition onto the side of the house so that Ramona can have her own bedroom, but she’s terrified to sleep alone in it and she can’t tell anyone. Her first-grade teacher doesn’t understand her. She wanted to do something terrible that would shock her whole family, something that would make them sit up and take notice.” It is a culmination of months of resentment and feeling misunderstood for Ramona, an accumulation of slights big and small that have finally come to a head. “She had been miserable the whole first grade, and she no longer cared what happened.
“Ramona had had enough,” Cleary wrote in Ramona the Brave.
Her best-known, most beloved creation is Ramona Quimby, the protagonist of seven of Cleary’s many books for young readers, and while Ramona is a naturally curious, cheerful kid, sometimes things do not go her way. The author, who died on March 25, three weeks short of her 105th birthday, was a giant of American literature, a singular talent whose work reshaped the history of children’s literature, and an unmatched prose writer of incredible deftness and skill. No one could write a foul mood like Beverly Cleary. Photo: Christina Koci Hernandez/San Francisco Chronicle by Getty Images
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