Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily ’s correspondent.Used Very Good (2 available) Used book that is in excellent condition. And even reading it now, I can’t help but feel a catch of excitement when the phone rings and a strange voice asks, “I know this is probably sort of sudden … but I was wondering if you would care to go to the movies with me tomorrow night.”

(I’ve never warmed up to the memoirs, which seem to me to lack some of the humor and generosity of her fictional work.) But Fifteen holds a special place in my heart it is the sweetest of her books. Henshaw to her other midcentury YAs, The Luckiest Girl and the almost painfully real Jean and Johnny. I love all of Cleary’s fiction, from the iconic Ramona series to the poignant Dear Mr. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.” And when a short, purse-carrying nerd asks Jane for a date, the awkwardness and heartache of the moment are real. When Jane acts flirtatious to seem more sophisticated and alienates Stan, for instance, Cleary writes, “The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else-grief perhaps, or regret. The Luckiest Girl - Beverly Cleary - Google Books A classic coming-of-age love story from beloved Newbery Medal winner Beverly Cleary.Sixteen-year-old Shelley Latham longs for her. These incidents might be small in the grand scheme of a life, but in the moment, they’re grave and real. Jane tries to impress Stan by drinking coffee and pretending to be blasé of course, in the end, she learns that he likes her as she really is.Ĭleary sees the humor in all this without ever minimizing her young characters’-or readers’-feelings. 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.

The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary