![]() ![]() She resonated among kids who had little sisters like that, and she resonated with kids who maybe also act like that themselves. The book was Ramona the Pest, and she’s a pest - but somehow she resonated. “(Ramona) wasn’t really that likable a character. ![]() “Ramona was kind of groundbreaking,” Diane Foote, curator of the Butler Children’s Literature Center at Dominican University, told me in 2016, when Cleary turned 100. Judy Blume characters would walk in her footsteps. Generations of schoolchildren would embrace her as one of their own. Amy Poehler would celebrate her girl power. ![]() Over the next six decades, she would appear in seven more books, a Hollywood movie and libraries from coast to coast. Ramona could ruin two birthday cakes in a single day, turn the entire house upside down with only a box of apples, and make herself the center of attention anywhere, any time - with or without the paper Easter bunny ears she would proudly don for, say, a trip to the library.Īnd back in 1955, when she made her title-character debut in the Beverly Cleary book Beezus and Ramona, the little girl with big brown eyes and a talent for trouble was just getting started. This was a kid who could secretly summon 15 friends to her house without her mother suspecting a thing - at least until the children started arriving on the doorstep, expecting a party. When I first met Ramona Quimby, she was only 4 years old and already showing signs of greatness. ![]()
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