What a horrid book.

I swear, re-reading this I realized that Harriet is exactly like one of my little sisters, so, she's going to be forced to read this soon.

I have taken up the habit of periodically of reading children's books or something aimed at a pre-teen audience. Sometimes it is something I read growing up, or that I might have read, but don't remember reading. I focus on the classics to see what I might have missed as a kid whose reputations have survived the years. I rarely find I dislike anything of this type that I read, and some of them I love. Harriet the Spy falls into the latter category. I had never heard of Harriet the Spy until reading Julie's, a GR friend, review.

Harriet is quite intelligent. Like many intelligent people, she struggles to interact socially with others not so gifted. She sees a lot in the world around her that she considers "dumb" and meets a lot of people in that world that she views as "dumb". While this perspective can come across as very negative and hurtful, this is not Harriet's intention, but she has to deal with the consequences. I wish I had read this at eleven years of age. The insights provided by the story would have been very valuable for me at that age, but even today are not wasted on me.

I always enjoy learning about any new author I come across. Louise Fitzhugh died at 46. I am sad that her years were so short, but I am happy she left us such a gift.

As a kid, I loved this book about a girl who spies on people and keeps a spy notebook.

This book recently came up in conversation between me and my sister, and I have to say, of all the books I've ever hated, this one had the most positive impact on my life. With Harriet, I got a glimpse into the kind of hateful, awful person I could be if I gave into my worst impulses, and it helped shape my conscience right before I began to consistently keep a journal.

I sometimes wrote unkind things about other people, but when I did, I focused on venting about their observable behavior. Unlike Harriet, I did not snoop on people, cruelly speculate about anyone's thoughts or home life, or write rude things just for the sake of being nasty. Even when I gave way to complete vitriol, I was still focused on publicly observable facts, and I wasn't motivated by sheer mean-spirited nastiness.

I remember finding this book deeply uncomfortable and disturbing. Although it was realistic in many ways, I thought that it was unnecessarily dark, and no one was truly likeable. I made it to the end out of my sense of curiosity and tension, and shuddered and felt terrible over Harriet's experiences as people discovered her notebook. What followed was an honest look into what could have been my future, and even though Harriet didn't learn any real lessons from her behavior, I did. I got a harsh, unforgiving look at the dark path that I could go down if I indulged all of my worst inclinations, and the memory of this book has made me a better, more circumspect person in all of my writing.

Ovo je kao da čitam oridžin stori nekog superzlikovca. Harijeti stvari bivaju uskraćene, svi joj okreću leđa i ona postaje super-zla i to je to.
OK nije to to, ali ne znam tačno šta je.
Ovo je roman iz sasvim drugog vremena koji se javlja iz potrebe da kaže čitaociima da su posluga ljudska bića i da su i ljudi manje srećni i pametni od nas ljudska bića. I zbog svih stvari koje je (svojom krivicom ili ne) Harijeta izgubila, ona se oseća baš loše, baš je teško za čitanje koliko se ona loše oseća, usamljenost i izgubljenost cure sa stranica.
Dakle, knjiga je zaista mudra i lepo pisana i nudi puno uvida, ali da je smešna kao što korice tvrde - baš nije.

I started writing by the age of eleven and as a kid connected with Harriet acutely. She wants to become a writer, and one way to practice writing is by carrying a notebook around and writing down what she thinks of people...and sometimes eavesdropping.

3/2023: Piece I wrote for Mockingbird inspired by this latest reading: https://mbird.com/literature/harriet-...

2/2023: Listened to the audiobook with the 4th grader. Still perfect.

This was a favorite book as a child and decided to reread it this weekend. Reading it now as an adult--wow. Louise Fitzhugh was a genius. I have so much to say about this book, which I'll leave for my longer review on the blog. For here I'll say: it a treat to walk down memory lane. As with a lot of my childhood rereads I was surprised to find that my memory had distorted the proportion of things in the book (for example, Ole Golly leaves pretty early on in the book. In my memory that was at the end. I thought the spy routes were covered frequently, but they actually were also a pretty small part of the overall length of the book.)
Harriet is a terrific character and the emotions are heartfelt and true. One of the things that really stood out to me (that I believe I also really liked as a child) was the , hmm, I really have a hard time finding the right word. Harshness? Nastiness? Not softness? of the vocabulary and writing. Janie calls someone a cretin. Adults are called out as ridiculous. There's often a quick sentence that is quite cutting. As a kid it amused me and I liked it. As an adult it amuses me, I like it, and I admire it in the writing and see it as a rarity in children's books.

Life-changing. I am not kidding. She was my heroine.

"Lovely, lovely. Now let's see, vegetables first, vegetables..." Sport started to sprint for the door. Miss Elson pulled him back by the ear. Pinky Whitehead arrived back. Miss Berry turned to him, enchanted. "You will make a wonderful stalk of celery."
"What?" said Pinky stupidly.
"And you"--she pointed at Harriet--"are an ONION."
This was too much. "I refuse. I absolutely REFUSE to be an onion."


"Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth." -- Ole Golly

And those illustrations!

If you've ever spent any time wondering how fictional characters like Olive Kitteridge, Eleanor Oliphant or Don Tillman got to be who they are, you need look no further than Harriet the Spy.

It's all here, in this book.

Harriet is a lot like these adult characters, but she's a child, an 11-year-old girl.

And, we learn quickly, she never suffered abuse or neglect. Neither parent committed suicide. She wasn't sexually molested by a neighbor, either.

She's just freaking quirky.

Is she somewhere “on the spectrum?” Does she have a “personality disorder?” Is she a “sociopath?”

It's hard to say. Or, I can't say.

But, damn it, she is fascinating.

My 11-year-old and I couldn't even read this book without taking breaks. We literally had moments where we had to shut the book, put it down on the coffee table, and stare at one another. The fragments of our bewilderment went a little like this:

She broke into the neighbor's house???

She spied at them, through a peek hole??

She doesn't understand that they are talking about her?!

There was one point in the story that was so incredible (not unbelievable for Harriet's character, but incredible), my daughter, who is NOT allowed to use profanity, uttered, “What the hell?” I gave her a free pass in that moment, because, honestly, I was thinking the same thing.

I have never encountered a book like this before. Or, I certainly haven't encountered a book like this that was written for the middle grades.

I don't even know if the author, Louise Fitzhugh, was a creative mastermind or a quirky lady herself, whose mind just worked this way.

This is one of those books that no writer should ignore. Something happened here that was equal parts brilliant, hilarious and disturbing.

This bizarre book, written in 1964, is from a time capsule of no particular era.

Writing like this can punch you square in the face at any time.

I genuinely don't like giving a book a bad review, but if it weren't that I have an obsessive need to finish a book once I start it, I would have put this one down the first time Harriet started screaming like a toddler. A large part of the reason I was so put-off by this book, is that I had set my expectations that I was reading a beloved and light-hearted childhood book about a girl who learns some life lessons after she is caught spying on some friends and neighbors.

These expectations were way off.

For one, I never read this book as a child. I had it on my childhood bookshelf, and I think I had read enough of the first few pages to have learned how to play "Town" when I was 7 or 8, but I never read this entire book like I thought I had. After the first few pages, everything was unfamiliar, so I really had no nostalgic feelings to help me appreciate the book as an adult.

Secondly, this book is not light-hearted; it's more like social commentary on the lonely lives of priveleged NYC children. I find this book depressing on so many levels. Harriet is so completely neglected by her parents and misunderstood by her friends and peers, and she shows her classmates very little understanding either.

Finally, Harriet doesn't appear to grow at all through this very tedious story (through very little fault of her own, as the adults she looks up to are such poor role models) and I NEED my characters to grow. Even after all she endures when her notebook is confiscated, she still continues to make superficial and mean-spirited notes largely about the people she spies upon being fat or ugly. Come on, Harriet, learn something! Even Ole Golly disappointed me, with her culminating letter to Harriet that came with the brilliant life lesson that 'sometimes it is just best to lie,' with nothing further to help Harriet grasp the concepts of empathy or tact.

My heart breaks for Harriet, who has clearly been permanately scarred by her parents' emotional abandonment, but at the same time, I just completely disliked her and her tantrums and cruel observations. Perhaps I'm being a bit hard on an eleven-year-old protagonist, but then I look at other admirable literary child characters, like Tree-ear in A Single Shard or Annemarie in Number the Stars and I just don't think a little growth is too much to expect at Harriet's age. I have a hard time believing that today's middle school children would find her very easy to relate to either, and I like my 'classics' to be timeless.

Sorry, I wish I could be, but I'm just not a fan!

*** Harriet as an onion was pretty priceless though. If only the entire book had been more like that scene...