EVERYONE, screamed Jennifer. YOU must READ this BOOK! In my head, I talk like Harriet the Spy! But as I am wise adult (ha), I try not to inflict that on people. Seriously...I wonder if my inner voice developed as a result of reading and re-reading and re-reading Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret as a child?! Of course sometimes my inner voice is Harriet (WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU???!!) and sometimes it is Beth Ellen (I don't know who I am and I want to hide).

I loved Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret as a kid & have kept both on my bookshelf. Recently I read an article alerting me that this is the 50th anniversary year of Harriet the Spy, & that spurred me to read this book, which I always liked even better than the first Harriet book. In fact I started thinking about reading this a couple of weeks ago & once I started thinking about it I couldn't get the urge out of my head!

I still love Harriet, Beth Ellen, Janie, & Harriet's wise, apparently fun parents despite their 1960s style vagueness. (Talk about life? No, run away & play now.) As an adult I am a little appalled by the life of wealth & privilege they live - summer homes! Cooks & maids! Wow. Zeeney & Wallace & Bunny are fabulously over the top & will make you hoot with laughter! Hup, yes. But mostly I LOVE Harriet and her EMPHATIC STYLE! (Harriet would not be happy with the Internet, the lack of any sense of mystery left about anyone, or the universal ban on ALL CAPS!!!) Harriet is NEVER afraid to let EVERYONE know what SHE is THINKING! (On the other hand, I also love when she thinks she's being mysterious & she goes around slitty-eyed just saying, "Hmmmm.") But it's good to know that she'll hold a friend's hand in the night when needed. Harriet, despite her brashness and nosiness and pugnacious rightness, has a good heart.

To start with, Louise Fitzhugh might have been the first writer to really blow my mind (chances are E.B. White was the first). I was 8 or 9 or something like it, and for the first time I felt understood: being a kid wasn't a cutesy Enid Blyton cakewalk and there mostly weren't any fantastical adventures just around the bend/in a wardrobe/in a letter delivered by an owl. The world was weird yet dumb yet intriguing, and it was possible to have so many feelings about all of it. You could be a little bit bad, or seem that way, when really all you wanted was to document and figure out all this weirdness and to not be kept from doing so by other people's stupidity or conformity. Adults, of course, were the weirdest thing of all.

The Long Secret isn't quite Harriet he Spy, but it still has many of these hallmarks and a looseness of plot that makes it feel very much like the younger sibling of "literary" fiction. The focus is less on Harriet and more on her peer/friend of convenience Beth Ellen, who turns out to be a fascinating little individual. As always, adults are just the darndest thing--at age 27, I can now confirm that this is true, and I'm glad Louise Fitzhugh was straight with me and so many other kids about it.

Was it really a "long" secret?

I think Louise Fitzhugh had a lot of great ideas for Harriet, but I think sometimes she struggled to know where to go with her, whilst introducing new characters. This is a follow on to Harriet The Spy, but it's more adult, I feel than the original book was.

This is set over Harriet's summer holidays, and is mainly focused around Harriet, Beth Ellen and Janie. (Sport and Ole Golly get the briefest of passing mentions.) They spend a lot of time at the beach, and not much time writing in notebooks. Oh sure, Harriet does write in her notebook at the beginning, but certainly not as much as the first book. In fact, it's near enough forgotten about.

The great "mystery" or "secret" in this book, is these mysterious, almost biblical quotes that are getting found randomly. In bike baskets, at place settings in restaurants, everywhere really. Does it really lend anything to the story? No. Can you see who the culprit is right away? Yes. Is there any reason provided as to why the culprit does what they do? No. It's a pretty damp squib ending, and I don't think it was very well thought out.

There's a whole host of new characters introduced, sadly (at least in my edition, which has different cover art to what is pictured, but has the same ISBN), missing Louise's fabulous line drawings. I really wanted to see how Mama Jenkins would look in Louise's drawing style. She seemed to be the most well described character, the rest of the new characters weren't her best. (But at least Janie doesn't go through a complete personality transplant like she does in the reboots of the series.)

Harriet really irritated me in this book for some reason. Whereas during a re-read of the original book recently, I felt she was definitely on the spectrum, this book she does come across as a real brat at times. She behaves quite aggressive and rude towards her so-called friends, and frustrated me no end with her attitude sometimes.

Also, it seemed to be a thing where every character either screamed, shouted, shrieked or screeched at each other, mostly brought on by either Harriet or Beth Ellen's irritating mother, Zeeny.

This book does lean towards slightly more teenage ideas, such as the discussion of periods, with both Janie and Beth Ellen getting theirs, and Harriet feeling slightly left out. This is touched upon slightly in the reboots as well, with Sport's voice breaking, but it's forgotten about/never mentioned again after the discussion in one chapter. However, this may need to be read through with slightly younger children, or you could choose to pre-read this, before introducing your children.

I am still trying to get Sport for a reasonable price (seems to be really expensive for some reason) and I seem to have a different cover edition of this to everyone else. I would still recommend reading this and the reboots alongside the original, but they’re not a patch on it, since they seem to be sadly missing the notebooks.

A bit of an odd book, but I guess it's the point of Harriet the Spy books to be more than a bit odd.

Anyway, this one was about Beth Ellen Hansen grappling with her identity and her place in the world. Meanwhile, Harriet is there also being by turns a friend and the absolute scourge of polite society.

I can't tell if I'm just biased from too many re-reads, or if Beth Ellen's perspective is less vitally weird and compelling than Harriet's, but this book was enjoyable regardless. Fitzhugh's sophisticated ability to convey a very specific feeling while not ever spelling it out exactly and making sure you know the character feeling it doesn't understand what they're feeling is as good as ever. The amount of religion in this installment felt a little strange, but I guess you do need new thorny topics to tackle in Fitzhugh's sideways way.

Harriet's parents are particularly excellent in this, and Beth Ellen's grandmother is a great character as well. Beth Ellen's story, while more low-key than being inside Harriet's mind, is a very satisfying one. You can't help but feel how powerful and freed she feels by the end.

I wish I could have an uncomplicated love for this book but there was a lot of fatphobia in it and that is hard to overlook

This was a huge fave of mine when I was young and I read it probably a hundred times. It still got me and all the emotion of being young felt so real but a funny thing I noticed is how many descriptions there were of fat people as so disgusting in all these ways. I didn’t remember that at all! And as an adult I keep thinking - was there a point to that? And I don’t know. Maybe it was just a fun way to get a laugh on the 60s or whatever

While it doesn't quite live up to its classic predecessor ('Harriet the Spy'), it's still fun to revisit some familiar characters. Apparently intended to be a more serious book than 'Harriet,' 'The Long Secret' takes up some more sensitive themes (menstruation, parental neglect, religious belief) with mixed results. Controversial at the time, the conversation about menstruation (between two twelve year old girls who have experienced it, and Harriet, who hasn't) is sensitive and laugh out loud funny. The attempt to make sense of the problem of religious "fanaticism" is more unconvincing, although Fitzhugh lets her nonreligious characters talk and act with a charming transparency. Harriet's attempt to talk to her affluent, nonpracticing parents about their religious beliefs is perfectly pitched. It's her meeting with an elderly, black, backwoods preacher that falls flat, although it doesn't hurt the emotional throughline of the book, which is its real strength. As in 'Harriet,' the big issue here is family relationships and how children's identities and emotional lives, while deeply private and unique, depend so much on parental love and care. Harriet's parents are a warm and steady presence this time around -- in real contrast to 'Harriet' -- so apparently things have improved in their house since Ole Golly left. It's Beth Ellen, this book's protagonist, who has the growing to do.

I just love Fitzhugh's realism. I was prepared for this sequel to HARRIET THE SPY (still need to read SPORT) to disappoint. It didn't. Set out in The Hamptons on Long Island (where the wealthy New Yorkers summer), Harriet and two school friends spend the summer by the sea. Told from multiple points of view, with Beth Ellen's character and story are really developed, and we and Harriet realize how quick Harriet was to jump to conclusions about this mousy friend in the first book.

The long Secret begins with a nasty, cryptic, religious secret note and Harriet’s immediate compulsion to spy and find out who sent it. She enlists her friend Beth Ellen to reluctantly help her. Fithzugh introduces a host of whacky characters like the family from the south, which is trying to get rich making toe medicine, the wise ex-pastor and Bunny the pyjama-wearing piano player and socialite. The mystery is suspenseful and Fitzhugh once again mercilessly exposes peoples' foibles and the differences between poor and rich. The themes are layered, authentic and kid-friendly - about feeling left out, friendship, imperfect adults and growing up.

Fitzhugh writes about the complexity, messyness and often unkindness of human nature. She writes children as they really are and that is what is so refreshing.

As much as I love Harriet the Spy, I love this sequel even more! Louise Fitzhugh's writing style is deceptively simple, and very good at describing confusing and complex emotions. I love all the little details that are such an overlooked part of our everyday lives: like getting a funny image in our heads when someone says something odd, picking at a scab, or staring at something for no particular reason. Most writers omit these kinds of details and assume they are unimportant, but Fitzhugh's use of them is very smart. They make the world and the characters seem much more real to me! It feels like stream-of-consciousness writing, but it is much more restrained and never puts style over substance.

There is no shortage of themes, as Beth Ellen's story covers everything from entering adolescence to uncertainty about religion and becoming your own person. Her conflicting feelings about all these are conveyed with delicacy and simplicity, but always ring true. And though this is a very emotional book, it is very funny too. The deadpan humor is clever but still child-accessible, especially in the way Fitzhugh observes people. She satirizes the shallowness and herd mentality of the "jet set", while the humor revolving around humbler characters like the Jenkins family and Janie feels more like affectionate teasing than outright ridicule.

This is a strange, ambiguous story(we never know for certain the note-leaver's motive). But I find this makes it more impactful rather than unsatisfying, because it always leaves me pondering what exactly the Preacher was implying in his last appearance and what motivated Beth Ellen to start leaving the notes.

The Long Secret is a very unique middle grade book. It's not easy to describe, except to say that it is both down-to-earth and slightly surreal, both simple and complex, and both strange and wonderful . After many re-reads I still count this story among my favorites!

Didn't finish. It's like this one was written by a different author. Skip it.

This story mostly followed Harriet’s summer time best friend Beth Ellen as she navigates through childhood trauma alongside Harriet trying to catch the person responsible for leaving mysterious and offensive notes around town.

As much as I loved Harriet the Spy as a child, I didn't know her book was the first in a series.

Thanks to Hamilton Library and ILL, I was able to read more.