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A review of Harriet the Spy

by Louise Fitzhugh

A children’s book about observing and writing as a way of growing up, about both being in a group and being alone.

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

Harriet the Spy Have you ever loved a book when you were a kid – and then reread it, finding you’d forgotten all the details? That just happened to me with Harriet the Spy: rereading it took me back 30 years in one fell swoop to being a lonely, brainy, smart-alecky kid.

Harriet is 11. She lives in Manhattan and attends a girls’ school. An only child, she reads avidly. More importantly she writes constantly in a ring notebook she carries around with her everywhere. She observes the other kids at school, her parents; she has a spy route after school with several houses she watches regularly.

What happens to lonely kids who are good at observing their surroundings from a certain distance but bad at fitting in? You create a world of conspiracy all your own. "Maybe Ole Golly knows something about Cook that Cook doesn’t want her to know. Check on this." I’ve been making lists like this for as long as I can remember: you feel you have special insights, and that they may slip away if you don’t discipline yourself tremendously. Unfortunately, Harriet has no way of judging how misanthropic she’s become: "I think Miss Elson is one of those people you don’t bother to think about twice." I remember that kind of quick judgement too – you have a certain feeling that seems valid, but no way of knowing it won’t apply forever.

I found myself looking to other adults than my parents for intellectual and spiritual companionship, to be understood in an uncomplicated way – teachers, friends of the family. For Harriet, it’s her nanny Ole Golly. "That was one thing about Ole Golly, thought Harriet, she never, never said dull things like, ‘How was school today?’ or ‘How did you do in arithmetic?’ or ‘Going out to play?’ All of these were unanswerable questions, and she supposed that Ole Golly was the only grown-up that knew that."

Harriet’s notebook is found and read aloud by her classmates. And the caustic, perceptive unpleasant comments about others come across as mean and petty. Harriet is absolutely confused and hurt by her classmates’ united front against her. She had no idea that her actions could have effects – probably an essential lesson for life. And besides, a passionate observer and writer finds life loses its excitement when her notebook is taken away from her: "She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. Her thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down."

I had forgotten, for instance, that Harriet has tantrums, that she screams and cries and lies around in bed for days, that she’s sent to a child psychologist – that had all slipped my mind in the intervening decades. But I remembered the feeling of being alone against the world, the sensation that I may be quicker than others – but that in the big picture that doesn’t matter a whit if you’re not accepted.

This book won’t work read aloud, it seems to me. But if you know a young reader who’s a bit in a world of her own – this will let her know others have been there before her.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Harriet the Spy

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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