In short, Cleary brings us all the small challenges and triumphs that made even a 1950s adolescence such a roller coaster. It takes Jane three tries to get her arm into her coat. When Stan picks her up, he steps on a cat toy, which embarrasses him. Jane, an inexperienced dater, is thrilled by Stan’s attention, and she likes him a lot, but there are problems: a “smooth” girl from his past a sophisticated, cashmere-clad nemesis who makes Jane feel frumpy and Miss Muffet-ish a trip to Chinatown that makes Jane feel gauche. What follows is the gradual and realistic evolution of their relationship. While babysitting an indulged and neglected brat, Jane meets the dog-food delivery boy, a new kid in town named Stan Crandall. Jane Purdy is a teenage girl living in the suburbs of San Francisco. And like the rest of her oeuvre, it holds up, even decades down the line. Like all of Cleary’s work, it combines gentle observational humor with a genuine understanding of young people. And while there’s no shortage of well-deserved and lovely tributes out there, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite of her books: Fifteen, a YA novel published in 1956. From the cover of a seventies edition of Fifteen.īeverly Cleary has turned one hundred.
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