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No one could write a foul mood like Beverly Cleary.
Ramona had had enough, Cleary wrote inRamona the Brave.
She had been miserable the whole first grade, and she no longer cared what happened.
She wanted to do something bad.
Her first-grade teacher doesnt understand her.
Im going to say a bad word!
she shouted with a stamp of her foot.
Her parents, duly warned, fall silent, waiting for Ramona to produce her horrible statement.
Its a classic Cleary sequence.
Theres the unexpected twist of humor that arrives when her parents and sister burst into laughter.
All three of them laughed.
They tried to hide it, but they laughed.)
As you read that passage, you laugh out loud at guts!
but your stomach also churns.
My mother read the Ramona books to my younger sister and me when we were in early elementary school.
As a child, I mostly remember feeling shock at Ramonas daring.
She spoke back to the teachers!
I remember listening with almost forensic interest to the passages that described Ramonas worry when her parents fought.
My own parents were happily married, but Ramona was right.
When something was tense between them, it felt apocalyptic.
Listening to my mother read Ramona out loud was accessing a form of double vision.
Here was Ramona close reading her parents, trying to interpret the signs, just as I did.
Then how come you expect us kids to be so perfect all the time?
Ramona demands of her father.
She did her best, and Ramona saw it.
But Clearys true genius was for the emotional realism she gradually developed alongside that external grounding.
She saw the bad moods and she saw the scarily mundane things that cause the bad moods.
When I read that guts!
Cleary writes that section, as she does most of her work, in a very close third-person voice.
The power of it is also in the fact that Cleary would never let the scene end there.
Ramona fully loses it.
Bursting into tears, she threw herself facedown on the couch.
She kicked and she pounded the cushions with her fists.
Everyone was against her.
Even the cat did not like her, Cleary writes.
Her parents continued to sit in silence, but Ramona was past caring what anyone did.
She cried harder than she ever had cried in her life.
She cried until she was limp and exhausted.
When she finally turns to the bedroom shes still afraid of, she has no energy for fear left.
Worn out as she was by anger and tears, Ramona faced the truth.
She could no longer go on being afraid of the dark, Cleary writes.
Ramona bravely leaves her bed to get a book.
Nothing had grabbed her by the ankles.
Nothing slithered out from under the curtains to harm her.
Nothing had chased her.
That direct, firm, Cleary narrative voice pulls us close to Ramona, too.
We become her again.
We are pulled into a childs perspective, and our own children watch us as it happens.
They listen to our voices as we read Ramonas fears aloud and speak her concerns.
