This $&%*ing kid, or, A middle grade delight

Elana K. Arnold's Just Harriet & Harriet Spies

“Ah,” said Nanu. She came into the dining room, where I was examining the curtains. “Find anything interesting?”

Through the magnifying glass, I could see that the threads that made the curtain fabric were made of tinier threads that looked like little strands of colorful hair. “Everything is interesting,” I said.

“That’s my girl,” said Nanu proudly.

—Harriet Spies, by Elana K. Arnold

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Hello, friends.

I’m going to do my best here to actually articulate what it is that I love so much about these books, but it’s probably just going to devolve into a free-for-all of quotes. Consider yourself warned.

Also, the way I’ve been talking them up at the library basically amounts to this: OMG IT’S SET IN A CHARMING B&B ON AN ISLAND AND THERE’S A CAT NAMED MATZO BALL WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW HERE HERE TAKE IT

So, again: You have been warned.

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Sometimes I lie. I don’t know why I lie, and it’s usually about dumb things that people figure out right away, or really soon. It’s embarrassing, if you want to know the truth. (The truth about lying! Hahaha.)

—Just Harriet, by Elana K. Arnold

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Harriet Wermer has just finished up third grade, is a soon-to-be big sister, and is very much looking forward to summer vacation. But a wrench gets thrown into the works when her mother gets put on bed rest, and her parents decide that Harriet should spend the summer with her grandmother on Marble Island.

Harriet adores her Nanu and she loves helping out at the Bric-a-Brac, her Nanu’s bed-and-breakfast, but she isn’t happy about her life being upended. Even bringing along her beloved cat Matzo Ball doesn’t entirely smooth her ruffled feathers:

But this day, taking the suitcase to Marble Island for the summer, it was too heavy for me to carry. Probably because I’d filled it full of books. And rocks. They weren’t just any rocks. They were rocks that I had painted faces on. They were my special collection, and I didn’t want to leave them at home. Also they were heavy, and I felt like making Dad carry lots of heavy stuff.

That moment, I think, was the first time I said, “This $&%*ing kid.” But it wasn’t the last. After that, I said it at least once a chapter for the duration of my two-book marathon.

Every single time I said it, I said it with amusement, with affection, with delight.

Because boy oh boy, do I love Harriet.

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She lies to avoid embarrassment. She also never breaks a promise:

I hated making promises. Because even though I sometimes don’t remember to tell the truth, I never break a promise. So I try to avoid making them.

And that, in a nutshell, is Harriet: She is incredibly aware of her faults. Sometimes she works to actively change her habits; sometimes she works to avoid getting called out for her behavior. It depends on her mood and on the situation—in the moment, she’ll default to defensiveness and maybe lying, but with reflection, she’s extremely willing to consider how her own actions contribute to conflict.

She’s angry, sad, bossy, stubborn. She makes amends when she hurts someone. She’s perceptive, empathetic, clever, loving, curious, loyal. She’s incredibly funny—sometimes deliberately so, sometimes unintentionally—and despite being angry and sad and scared about going to Marble Island, she’s a generally good natured kid who’s more often cheerful than not.

She finds mysteries wherever she goes. Sometimes they’re concrete: What keyhole does the mysterious key she found fit into? What happened to the Captain’s binoculars? And sometimes they’re more abstract:

Nanu said that the other kids hadn’t always understood my dad. That made me think about how I sometimes thought that he didn’t understand me. It occurred to me that maybe I didn’t understand my dad as well as I thought I did. Maybe parts of my dad were a mystery too.

Regardless of the mystery she’s trying to solve, she throws herself into solving it with her whole heart. And, like all of us who throw ourselves into things with our whole hearts, hers is easily bruised—and maybe tangled up a bit with her ego:

“I’m going to come visit you the weekend after next,” Dad said. “I don’t care,” I said. But in my head I was saying Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.

I felt those two lines in my gut. That feeling of being SO. ANGRY., but knowing that underneath, that anger is actually sadness. Of not wanting to show it, not wanting the person you’re mad at to know that your anger is actually more about feeling abandoned? PHEW. What a gorgeously perfect depiction of that extremely complicated feeling.

They’re sweet-but-not-treacly books, funny and heartfelt and gentle and emotionally honest. The second one, in particular, made me cry buckets—not because it was sad, but because it unlocked so much of the worry I was feeling about Lemon at the time. And, as usual, after a big cry and a big nap, I was ready, like Harriet, to try to find a solution to the problem at hand.

Never forget: No matter our age, children’s books help us learn, grow, heal.

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More soon,
Leila