A Boy and His Bike

In Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, Ramona longs for a bike of her own. She only gets to ride a bike when her friend Howie lets her borrow his. Henry and Beezus finds Henry Huggins in the same situation. He wants nothing in the world more than his very own bike, which he then hopes to use to help him get a paper route. The trouble is, bikes are expensive, and Henry’s parents don’t have the money to buy him one. If he’s going to get one, the task will fall to Henry to earn the money for it.

Henry knows exactly which one he wants: the beautiful shiny red bike that he passes in the shop window every day. But it costs $59.95, which is an awful lot of money for a young boy without a paper route to produce. With a little help from Ramona’s older sister Beezus, Henry launches a business selling chewing gum that has both lucrative and disastrous results. He’s thrilled when the sometimes chummy, sometimes antagonistic Scooter McCarthy asks him to cover his paper route while he’s away, but first Henry must untrain his dog Ribsy, who, in an attempt to be helpful, has recently taken to collecting all of the newspapers in the neighborhood and depositing them on Henry’s porch. In this endeavor he receives some unexpected aid from Ramona, who is just as pesky as ever in this volume.

It’s interesting to note the differences in characterizations between the Ramona books and the Henry books. Ramona, of course, never comes off so badly from her own perspective. Meanwhile, though the Ramona books generally show Beezus as rather boring and prissy, the Henry books always emphasize that she is “very sensible, for a girl,” and it’s always Beezus who is willing to help Henry out of a jam, no matter how unladylike that requires her to be. She also seems to have a crush on Henry. Beezus is always popping up in the Henry books, but oddly enough, Henry scarcely makes an appearance in the Ramona books at all, and when he does it is usually only as a haughty crossing guard.

Henry, as usual, finds himself in all sorts of unusual situations in this book. It looks like his hopes for a bike are about to derail when he discovers that Ribsy is the recipient of a parking ticket whose fee will just about exhaust his bike fund. Then, when he finally does get his hands on a bike, courtesy of Beezus, it turns out to be such a clunker that none of his repairs are capable of rendering it rideable. It’s no surprise that Henry finally attains his prize at the end of the book, but it’s the unpredictable steps (and mis-steps) along the way that make Henry and Beezus a very satisfying read, worthy of standing alongside Cleary’s other accomplished Henry and Ramona novels.