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(Paperback - Spanish-language Edition)
Ramona Quimby, uno de los personajes mÁs queridos de la literatura infantil, empieza el tercer grado con una maestra nueva que los llama "chices". Nuestra incontrolable heroÍna se enfrenta a un reto tras otro, desde lavarse la cabeza con huevos, hasta vomitar delante de toda la clase, cuando trata de demostrarle a la seÑora Ballenay que ella no es una "superfastidiosa".
The further adventures of the Quimby family as Ramona enters the third grade.
More Reviews and RecommendationsNew readers find a friend in Beverly Cleary, who displays an uncanny understanding of kid life in Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Henry Huggins, and other titles in her classic series of books about life on Klickitat Street -- books that hold up decade after decade.
More About the AuthorName:
Beverly Cleary
Also Known As:
Beverly Atlee Bunn (birth name)
Current Home:
Carmel, California
Date of Birth:
April 12, 1916
Place of Birth:
McMinnville, Oregon
Education:
B.A., University of California-Berkeley, 1938; B.A. in librarianship, University of Washington (Seattle), 1939
Awards:
Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, 1975; Newbery Honor for Ramona and Her Father, 1978; Newbery Honor for Ramona Quimby, Age 8, 1982; Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw, 1984
Beverly Cleary was inadvertently doing market research for her books before she wrote them, as a young children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington. Cleary heard a lot about what kids were and weren’t responding to in literature, and she thought of her library patrons when she later sat down to write her first book.
Henry Huggins, published in 1950, was an effort to represent kids like the ones in Yakima and like the ones in her childhood neighborhood in Oregon. The bunch from Klickitat Street live in modest houses in a quiet neighborhood, but they’re busy: busy with rambunctious dogs (one Ribsy, to be precise), paper routes, robot building, school, bicycle acquisitions, and other projects. Cleary was particularly sensitive to the boys from her library days who complained that they could find nothing of interest to read – and Ralph and the Motorcycle was inspired by her son, who in fourth grade said he wanted to read about motorcycles. Fifteen years after her Henry books, Cleary would concoct the delightful story of a boy who teaches Ralph to ride his red toy motorcycle.
Cleary’s best known character, however, is a girl: Ramona Quimby, the sometimes difficult but always entertaining little sister whom Cleary follows from kindergarten to fourth grade in a series of books. Ramona is a Henry Huggins neighbor who, with her sister, got her first proper introduction in Beezus and Ramona, adding a dimension of sibling dynamics to the adventures on Klickitat Street. Cleary’s stories, so simple and so true, deftly portrayed the exasperation and exuberance of being a kid. Finally, an author seemed to understand perfectly about bossy/pesty siblings, unfair teachers, playmate politics, the joys of clubhouses and the perils of sub-mattress monsters.
Cleary is one of the rare children’s authors who has been able to engage both boys and girls on their own terms, mostly through either Henry Huggins or Ramona and Beezus. She has not limited herself to those characters, though. In 1983, she won the Newbery Medal with Dear Mr. Henshaw, the story of a boy coping with his parents’ divorce, as told through his journal entries and correspondence with his favorite author. She has also written a few books for older girls (Fifteen, The Luckiest Girl, Sister of the Bride, and Jean and Johnny) mostly focusing on first love and family relationships. A set of books for beginning readers stars four-year-old twins Jimmy and Janet.
Some of Cleary’s books – particularly her titles for young adults – may seem somewhat alien to kids whose daily lives don’t feature soda fountains, bottles of ink, or even learning cursive. Still, the author’s stories and characters stand the test of time; and she nails the basic concerns of childhood and adolescence. Her books (particularly the more modern Ramona series, which touches on the repercussions of a father’s job loss and a mother’s return to work) remain relevant classics.
Cleary has said in an essay that she wrote her two autobiographical books, A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet, "because I wanted to tell young readers what life was like in safer, simpler, less-prosperous times, so different from today." She has conveyed that safer, simpler era -- still fraught with its own timeless concerns -- to children in her fiction as well, more than half a century after her first books were released.
Word processing is not Cleary's style. She writes, "I write in longhand on yellow legal pads. Some pages turn out right the first time (hooray!), some pages I revise once or twice and some I revise half-a-dozen times. I then attack my enemy the typewriter and produce a badly typed manuscript which I take to a typist whose fingers somehow hit the right keys. No, I do not use a computer. Everybody asks."
Cleary usually starts her books on January 2.
Up until she was six, Cleary lived in Yamhill, Oregon -- a town so small it had no library. Cleary's mother took up the job of librarian, asking for books to be sent from the state branch and lending them out from a lodge room over a bank. It was, Clearly remembers, "a dingy room filled with shabby leather-covered chairs and smelling of stale cigar smoke. The books were shelved in a donated china cabinet. It was there I made the most magical discovery: There were books written especially for children!"
Cleary authored a series of tie-in books in the early 1960s for classic TV show Leave It to Beaver.
Cleary's books appear in over 20 countries in 14 languages.
Cleary's book The Luckiest Girl is based in part on her own young adulthood, when a cousin of her mother's offered to take Beverly for the summer and have her attend Chaffey Junior College in Ontario, California. Cleary went from there to the University of California at Berkeley.
The actress Sarah Polley got her start playing Ramona in the late ‘80s TV series. Says Cleary in a Q & A on her web site: “I won’t let go of the rights for television productions unless I have script approval. There have been companies that have wanted the movie rights to Ramona, but they won’t let me have script approval, and so I say no. I did have script approval for the television productions of the Ramona series…. I thought Sarah Polley was a good little actress, a real little professional.”
What was the book that most influenced your life, and why?
The book that made the greatest impact on my life was The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Let me explain. When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so. My despairing mother made sure that we had children’s books in our house. One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade and in the days before TV I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading and actually enjoying The Dutch Twins. I have been a reader ever since.
What are your ten favorite books, and why?
My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.
My other favorites at this time fall into categories. Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite. Recently I have read Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam and Atonement by Ian McEwan and have recommended them to others. I also enjoy autobiographies because I am curious about the lives of others as seen by themselves. This House of Sky and Heart Earth by Ivan Doig, memories of hardscrabble ranching, were both enjoyable and enlightening to read about. I wouldn’t care to live such a life myself.
Favorite films?
This is a tough one. In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships! In high school my favorite was It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Ah…romance. Then came Gone with the Wind, the original version, not the version shown on TV today which has cut most of the history of the South and left only the love story. A film we recently have seen twice is Mr. Holland’s Opus, a moving story of a composer’s struggle to reconcile his creativity with his family responsibilities, a familiar problem in our household. I also enjoyed it because it was filmed at my high school, U.S. Grant in Portland, Oregon.
Favorite music?
I particularly enjoy cello music because our daughter plays the cello. I have listened to her practice for so many hours that I am familiar with the music written for that instrument. I am also fond of the popular music of the 1930s because my future husband and I danced to it so many Saturday nights when we were in college. He held me close and sang in my ear in his beautiful tenor voice: “You’re as sweet as a red rose in June, dear…” Ah...youth.
If you had a book club, what would it be reading, and why?
My book club would read and discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the great works of American fiction. I read it when I was about 12 years old and was so eager to find out what happened next that I am sure much of the novel’s meanings passed me by.
Who are your favorite writers, and what makes their writing special?
James Thurber is one of my favorites because of his wit and his view of American life. I have read all of the novels of Barbara Pym, tragic-comedies about women who live quiet English lives, the sort of women we have seen in villages when we have traveled in England. I always look forward to the next book by Anne Lamott who writes with self-mocking and brutal honesty about her own life in California. Although I do not read my own books, I have enjoyed writing them. Perhaps this makes me one of my favorite writers.
What else do you want your readers to know?
I like to read, walk, cook, and travel to cities. We live in the country so we miss museums and the bustle of city life. I also enjoy needlework of any kind and have made many of my own clothes and those of our children, knit sweaters for the whole family, designed and made needlepoint tapestries and pieced two quilts which now hang on the walls of our son’s home. At present our daughter-in-law and I are working on an embroidered wall hanging with a crazy-quilt background. When I am writing a book I also enjoy ironing, an idiosyncrasy that probably makes me sound more domestic than I really am. Working with my hands frees my imagination.
Ramona Quimby, uno de los personajes mÁs queridos de la literatura infantil, empieza el tercer grado con una maestra nueva que los llama "chices". Nuestra incontrolable heroÍna se enfrenta a un reto tras otro, desde lavarse la cabeza con huevos, hasta vomitar delante de toda la clase, cuando trata de demostrarle a la seÑora Ballenay que ella no es una "superfastidiosa".
Ramona tenía la esperanza de que sus padres se olvidaran de darle las recomendaciones de siempre. No quería que nada estropeara este día tan emocionante.
Fastídiate; voy a ir a la escuela en autobús yo sola alardeó ante su hermana Beatrice mientras desayunaban.
Notó un estremecimiento en el estómagoal pensar en el dia tan divertido que le esperaba, un día que iba a empezar montando en autobús el tiempo suficiente para sentirse lejos de casa pero no lo bastante para marearse. Ramona iba a ir en autobús porque durante el verano habían tenido lugar una serie de cambios en las escuelas de la zona de la ciudad donde vivían los Quimby. Glenwood, la escuela a la que iban las niñas antes, se iba a dedicar a la enseñanza secundaria solamente, por lo que Ramona tenia que empezar a ir a la escuela Cedarhurst.
Fastídiate tú dijo Beezus, que estaba demasiado contenta para enojarse con su hermana pequeña . Yo empiezo hoy la escuela superior.
Escuela intermedia -le corrigió Ramona, que no estaba dispuesta a permitir que su hermana se hiciera la mayor-. La escuela intermedia Rosemont no es lo mismo que la secundaria, y además tienes que ir andando.
Ramona habia llegado a una edad en que podia exigir a los demás que hablaran con propiedad y a si misma también. Durante todo el verano, cuando alguna persona mayor le habia preguntado en que' curso estaba, al contestar "en tercero", le habia dado lasensación de que mentía, porque la verdad es que no habia empezado tercero. Pero no podia decir que estaba en segundo, puesto que lo habia terminado en junio. Los mayores no entienden que en verano no existen los cursos.
Fastídiense las dos dijo el señor Quimby, mientras llevaba los platos del desayuno a la cocina . No son las únicas que van a la escuela hoy.
El dia anterior habia dejado de trabajar como cajero en el supermercado Shop-Rite. Hoy iba a volver a la universidad, porque queria convertirse en lo que él llamaba un profesor de verdad. También iba a trabajar un día a la semana en el almacén de congelados de la cadena de supermercados Sbop-Rite para "ir tirando", como dicen los mayores, hasta que terminara de estudiar.
-Si no se apuran, se van a fastidiar todos dijo la señora Quimby, removiendo la espuma que habia en el fregadero.
Se separó de la pila para no manchar el uniforme blanco que llevaba en la consulta del médico donde trabajaba de recepcionista.
Papá ¿te van a dar tarea?
Ramona se limpió el bigote de leche y recogiñ sus platos del desayuno.
Claro.
El señor Quimby intentó dar a Ramona con un trapo de cocina mientras pasaba junto a'éRamona soltó una risita y lo esquivó, contenta de verle contento. Ya nunca volverí a estar todo el día sentado delante de la caja de un supermercado, sumando las compras
de una fila enorme de personas que tienen prisa. Ramona deslizó su plato dentro del agua. ¿Y mama' va a tener que firmar tus notas? La señora Quimby soltó una carcajada. Espero que si dijo.
Beezus fue la úItima en llevar sus platos a la cocina.
-Papá¿tienes que estudiar para ser profesor? preguntó.
Ramona habia estado haciéndose la misma pregunta. Su padre sabia leer y sabía matemdticas. Sabía quiénes eran los exploradores de Oregon y sabía las equivalencias de las medidas.
El señor Quimby secó un plato y lo metió en el armario.
Voy a estudiar arte, porque quiero ser profesor de arte. Y voy a estudiar el desarrollo infantil ...
Ramona le interrumpió:
¿Qué es el desarrollo infantil?
Cómo crecen los niños contestó su padre.
"¿Hay que ir a la universidad para estudiar una cosa como esa?", se preguntó Ramona.
Llevaba toda la vida oyendo que para crecer hay que comer bien, normalmente cosas que no gustan, y dormir mucho, casi siempre cuando se tienen cosas más interesantes que hacer.
La señora Quimby colgó el trapo de cocina, cogió a Tiquismiquis, el gato viejo y color canela que tenían los Quimby, y lo soltó en la parte de arriba de las escaleras del sótano.
En marcha dijo , o van a llegar todos tarde a la escuela.
Después de las prisas de toda la familia lavándose los dientes, el señor Quimby dijo a sus hijas:
Abran la mano.
Y en cada una de ellas dejó caer una goma de borrar, nueva y de color rosa.
Es para darles suerte dijo , no porque piense que se van a equivocar.
Gracias dijeron las niñas.
Cualquier regalo les hacía ilusión, por muy pequeño que fuera, porque mientras la familia había estado ahorrando dinero para que el señor Quimby volviera a estudiar, los regalos habían sido escasos. A Ramona, que le gustaba dibujar tanto como a su padre, le gustó especialmente su goma nueva, suave, de color rosa perlado, con un ligero olor a plástico y perfecta para borrar rayas hechas a lápiz.
La señora Quimby dio a cada miembro de la familia su comida, dos en bolsas de papel y una, la de Ramona, en una maletita especial.
Bueno, Ramona . . . empezó su madre.
Ramona suspiró. Ya había llegado el momento de las recomendaciones que tanto odiaba.
-Por favor -dijo su madre-, sé....
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