There's a girl who leads a life of danger

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	• Harriet the Spy Louise Fitzhugh Yearling, 2001 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 143 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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You will not be able to put this book down because the plot is so breathtaking. You will feel like you're in Harriet's position. Sometimes I felt that I was the character in the book.
Harriet was running to the river, and she dropped her notebook and she did not realize it. Her friends picked it up and started reading it. They saw the parts written about them. They formed a Non Spy Club and they pulled nasty pranks on Harriet. Even her best friend, Sport, was pulling the same nasty pranks as the rest of her friends. Harriet goes to a therapist person to try to get Harriet to stop writing in her notebook. The therapy works a little but she still manages to write in her notebook even though her mom hid it somewhere in her house. Harriet found it and wrote in it still.

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There's a girl who leads a life of danger

I have a theory about "Harriet the Spy". I suspect that no adult that read this book once (and only once) as a child remembers it correctly. For example, if you had asked me, prior to rereading it, what the plot of "Harriet the Spy" was, I could have summed it up like so: Harriet the Spy is about a girl who wants to be a spy. She spies on lots of different people and writes in a notebook, but one day all her friends read the notebook and none of them like her anymore. That is the plot of "Harriet the Spy". And I would be half right. Surprising to me, I found I was forgetting much much more.

In truth, "Harriet the Spy" is about class, loss, and being true to one's own self. Harriet M. Welch (the M. was her own invention) is the daughter of rather well-to-do socialites. Raised by her nurse Ole Golly until the ripe old age of eleven, Harriet must come to terms with Ole Golly's eventual abandonment. Ole Golly marries and leaves Harriet to her own devices just as the aforementioned tragedy involving her friends and the notebook occurs. The combination of the nurse's disappearance from Harriet's life (leaving behind such oh-so helpful pieces of advice as, "Don't cry", and the like) and the subsequent hatred directed at Harriet by her former friends makes Harriet into a veritable she-devil. A willful child from the start (punishments are few and far between in the Welch family) Harriet slowly spirals downward until a helpful note from Ole Golly gives her the advice she needs to carry on.

So many things about this book appeal to kids. The realistic nature of peer interactions is one. Harriet randomly despises various kids, even before her notebook is read. After making their lives terrible, she eventually has to experience what they themselves have had to deal with. Author Louise Fitzhugh is such a good writer, though, that even as you disapprove of Harriet's more nasty tendencies you sympathize with her. Honestly, who would want ink dumped down their back? As Harriet observes various people on her spy route, she writes her observations about them as well as about life itself. She hasn't quite figured out the differences between her life and the life of her best friend Sport (the son of an impoverished irresponsible writer) though she does briefly ponder if she herself is rich (the fact that she has her own private bath, nurse, and family cook never quite occurs to her). On the whole, the book contains a multitude of wonderful characters. Harriet's parents are both amusing and annoying, completely dedicated to their daughter and completely clueless about her needs. I was especially shocked by a section of the book in which Harriet asks her mother if she'll be allowed to eat dinner with her parents that night. Gaah!

Accompanying the text are Fitzhugh's own meticulous line drawings. They're fantastic and eerie. Combined with this timeless story (timeless in all the good ways) the book deserves its status as one of the best books for children. Read it again to remember. You'll find a whole lot more than you bargained for.

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A Fabulous Book

(...) I have read the whole book of Harriet the Spy and as long as long as I live, I will love this book. This is the best book I have ever read, because it has very vivid writing and you can almost hear Harriet thinking and see what Harriet is doing (what everybody is doing). Harriet learns two things: First, sometimes you need to lie to your friends in order to keep them your friends. Second, friends are very important. I could read this book a thousand times more and not get bored with it. I would recommend over 70 people reading this book a month.

Harriet the Spy sparkles

I first knew about Harriet the Spy in 5th grade when the movie came out. I was entranced, enthralled and totally taken with such a moving film (no wonder it's called "One of the best children's movies ever!"), and I bought the book later that week - along with Fitzhugh's sequel The Long Secret. I became a "child spy" like Harriet because I found her lifestyle amazing, and Louise Fitzhugh is an excellent writer. Harriet the Spy sparkles as one of literature's best children's novels!

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A Classic That Now Seems Dated

This is the story of a rich little 11 year old girl named Harriet who lives in a big mansion in New York with her parents, her nanny, and a cook. Harriet likes to spy on the people in her neighborhood all the time and then writes her observations about them in her journal notebook. Most of her observations, however true, are generally mean or unflattering.

Once the nanny leaves, Harriet and her parents are forced to take on some additional responsibilities. Harriet has a hard time adjusting to this and starts writing incessantly in her journal. At one point her parent's have to take her to see a psychiatrist. He shows Harriet that if she spends all of her time writing everything down in her notebook that she won't really be living life, but rather only observing it. Once Harriet's notebook is taken away from her for a time, she is then forced to learn to balance her time better between living and observing. This takes time however as she first goes through a little rebellious phase.

Harriet then runs into trouble at school when her notebook falls into the wrong hands and everyone at school reads the mean comments she has been making about them all. (Rather than taking the notebook back from them however and saying that it didn't below to them, she let's them keep it instead.) Based on the things she had said, her two best friends Janie and a boy named Sport no longer want to play with her and instead join up with a bunch of other kids in the school in order to form the "Spy Catchers Club". The initial main purpose of the club is to get back at Harriet for all of the mean things she has said about them all in her notebook, but it then turns into a social club. The club works for a while to break a lot of people out of the dull molds they were in, but then most of them revert back to the way they had always behaved.

In the end, in order to get her friends back Harriet learns that sometimes you have to tell a little white lie in order not to hurt other people's feelings. She also discovers that her talent for writing might be better served as a newspaper reporter rather than as a military spy.

A women who works in my department and used to be a 5th grade teacher around 30 years ago, told me that her students used to love this book. My girls who are now ages eight and six however didn't find the book quite as entertaining. Maybe it would have been better for them to have read it when they were a little older, but I really don't think the content was over their head since they've enjoyed other similar types of books in the past. One reason for the differences in opinion might be that the book was written in 1964 by Louise Fitzhugh and unfortunately now seems to be dated. One example that comes to mind is that Harriet's best friend Janie, who wants to become a mad scientist when she grows up is always doing things like threatening to blow up the school, or burning holes in her floor in her room at home with chemicals. (I just don't think that type of behavior would be considered quite so funny in today's environment.) The illustrations in this book which I believe were drawn by Louise Fitzhugh herself were also probably not the best I've ever seen. I don't believe we will be picking up the other books that follow in this series, or in any rush for that matter to go out and see the movie based on this book.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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