Beverley Cleary is 103! Wow!

[conuly]

It's a pity she's no longer writing, but it's still amazing that she's still around! I read her memoir, Girl From Yamhill, once. Her earliest memory, as recounted there, is of the end of the First World War. (Not that she understood what was going on, but still.) Can you believe it!?

And an interesting anecdote, appropriate nowadays in this age of vaccine refusal and "chickenpox parties" - as a young child she was sent upstairs to play with a neighbor because that neighbor had chickenpox and was quarantined and lonely, but young Beverley had already had chickenpox. Unfortunately, it turned out the neighbor had smallpox instead, and so she got sick. But survived! Despite what anti-vaxxers tell us about the past, and about the relative seriousness of childhood illness, there was no talk of sending children to this neighbor's house specifically to expose them to disease that they might otherwise have avoided. The poor child was quarantined even when they thought it was "only" chickenpox.

Comments

[muninnhuginn]

How lovely!

I don't think we got a whole lot of her books in the UK when I was growing up, but I very clearly remember "Fifteen". I was about twelve or thirteen when I read it, at a time when there were so few books for teens and I loved it. I think I read it twice through before rather reluctantly exchanging it for something else. My English teacher was very disapproving: he knew that I knew that when he was extolling the virtues of "Bleak House" the recommendation was aimed at me. Fact was what I needed to read at the time was Beverley Cleary.

[conuly]

Yes, Bleak House, there's an uplifting, age appropriate book for a young teen.