Something Queer at the Library by Elizabeth Levy
My rating: 5/5 cats
APRIL
as part of my personal reading challenges for 2017, once a month i will be revisiting a favorite book from when i was a little bitty karen and seeing if it holds up to my fond memories and determining if i can still enjoy it as an old and crotchety karen.
fingers crossed.
so: first things first. in answer to the question ‘does this book hold up?’ yes, it does. it more than holds up, in fact—i think i may have liked this one even MORE reading it as an adult.
baby-karen’s review:
i like doggies and books and what the heck is a lhasa alpo??*
hahah—queer**
adult-review:
what a fun and truly heartwarming memory-ride i have just experienced! maybe this got an extra boost of nostalgia brought into the mix by seeing those familiar illustrations again, which cracked me up because they label EVERYTHING, completely unnecessarily, but so so cutely.
and check out mr. hobart—a black, male librarian? not bad, 1977!
i so clearly remember gwen’s habit of tapping on her braces when deep in thought about queer things:
revisiting it just brought all sorts of warm floody heart-feelings into me.
i’m not sure why i got such a kick out of this book here in my dotage—it’s barely a book—fewer than fifty pages with manymany illustrations. baby-karen no doubt responded to the fun adventure of little girls solving book-related mysteries and SO MANY DOGGIES, but surely grown-karen is more discriminating? more refined in her tastes? more—OH LOOK A CHUBBY DOGGIE!
it just oozes charm—a couple of pre-teen girls solve the mystery of “who is cutting out all these pictures from the dog books we just borrowed from the library and what if we are blamed for it?”
i love the gleeful-terrorist expressions on their faces in mr. hobart’s presumed imaginings of them. and also the inception-y thought-within-a-thought of the illustration.
i loved all the ups and downs of their investigation, determining what is and what is not a helpful clue:
i love that they hang out in the library as much as i did when i was little
and i love their youthful confidence that all solutions can be found in books and that two days is plenty of time to read twenty books and to prepare a recalcitrant dog to win a dog show and ALSO solve a crime.
i mean, some of these things won’t happen, but they definitely do solve that crime! which satisfied baby-karen, although adult karen definitely would have preferred a harsher punishment than View Spoiler » for such a ruthless book vandal.
in any event, i’m really glad i reread this one; it’s practically a pamphlet, but it really did make me smile, which is exactly what one needs in april, this cruelest of months.
* baby-karen did not live in a world with the internet, so here is where i help out all current-day baby karens. a lhasa apso is this:
**baby-karen lived in a different time, where words like “gay” and “retard” were used as playground calls that had nothing to do with intolerance; just a child’s instinctive assessment of such words as loaded or taboo in some way. also, this was new england, and you can’t expect new englanders to excise the phrase “wicked retarded” from our vocabulary. we never used racial slurs, though, so retroactive props to us for that. wicked progressive.
******************************************
this one might be the cheapest of them all ! LGM!
despite the evidence gleaned from rigorous archival research that tells me i read many of the books in this series*:
this is the ONLY one i remember.
no bookplate, AGAIN, dammit, but admire my drunken decision to mark my territory, crookedly, just wherevs:
* and in which i made a mess beside the first book on this list, which i think is a result of my having mistakenly marked it as ‘read’ before i had in fact read it, dutifully correcting that error, and then adjusting/updating my records once i had read it, leaving confusing scrawls all over this very important official record of reading history, and causing me to resort to an all-new notation—the clarity of a gigantic arrow leading from the word “read” to the title of the book. you’re welcome, posterity.
JANUARY: wait till helen comes
FEBRUARY: the little gymnast
MARCH: zucchini
MAY: good-bye pink pig
JUNE: the girl with the silver eyes
JULY: the phantom tollbooth
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