This isn’t a great children’s book. This is a great book whose protagonist happens to be very young.This is a book that manages to be shocking in spite of the absence of sex, drugs, and violence. Harriet isn’t forced to kick arse in a fight to the death, or struggle to feed her family. On the contrary, the only shocking thing about her personal circumstances is how privileged she is. Her family employs a housemaid, a cook, and a “nurse” improbably named Ole Golly. It can be hard for a modern reader of any age to understand what exactly that last job entails. Harriet isn’t sick, or sickly, so Ole Golly isn’t that kind of nurse. Ole Golly isn’t a babysitter exactly, either. She does stay with Harriet when her parents go to parties at night, which is frequently; but she doesn’t supervise Harriet very closely, or even walk her to school. She’s a bit like a governess, but she doesn’t teach lessons.Actually, she does. She just isn’t paid to. And although Harriet leads a pampered existence, Ole Golly believes she can handle tough truths. “Tears won’t bring me back,” she says sternly when she has to leave Harriet for good. “Remember that. Tears never bring anything back. Life is a struggle and a good spy gets in there and fights. Remember that. No nonsense.” And, later, in a letter: If you’re missing me I want you to know I’m not missing you. Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don’t get in them and lie down. You can even make stories from yours, but remember, they don’t come back. Just think how awful it would be if they did. You don’t need me now. You’re eleven years old which is old enough to get busy at growing up to be the person you want to be.Don’t sit around missing me when I’m gone. Life is tough, and eleven years old is plenty old enough to get out there and start fighting for what you need.Tell that to a generation who grew up on the creepy stalker vision of parental care presented in Love You Forever.This may not sound too startling to people who regularly devour dystopian and gritty urban YA fiction. Yes, Katniss has to fight actual life-or-death battles. But the whole point of her story is that she shouldn’t have to. Harriet is taught early on that life is a fight, and even members of the well-fed elite have to jump into the ring.Granted, Harriet’s battles are brought on by her own worst qualities. She has a lot of them. She is not a winning, adorable child. She’s blunt and obnoxious and thinks mean things even about the people she cares about. And she doesn’t care about many. She alienates everyone she knows with her writing. And then she wins them back – with her writing.This book has aged well in every sense. It’s fun for an adult to read or reread because the writing is ridiculously, enviably good. It’s a book to give to children for the same reason. It’s also a terrific cautionary tale for very modern reasons.As Meg Cabot, author of the Princess Diaries series, points out in her short appreciative essay: Louise Fitzhugh could not have known how prescient Harriet the Spy was. Fifty years after its publication, some young girls and boys (and even old ones too) are still recording their innermost thoughts and feelings, only now they’re doing it far too publicly on the Internet, causing themselves untold amounts of trouble.If only they listened to Ole Golly.Cabot’s essay is included along with several others, all by prominent writers. Gregory Maguire’s even includes an excerpt from an early diary he kept after being inspired by Harriet’s example:Tonight when we were going to swim, Annie said, “Aaahh! There’s a spider in my goggles.”Joe said, “Drown it! Throw it in the lake!”Annie said, “No, don’t drown it.”I said, “Annie, since when have you cared about the welfare of a measly spider?”She said, “It’s not that. I just don’t want any drowned spiders in any lake that I intend to swim in.”Read this book if you haven’t already. Reread it if it’s been awhile. And get this anniversary edition if you don’t already have your own copy of Harriet. It’s a lot of fun to see how other authors were affected by the abrasive but compelling Harriet M. Welsch.
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...
What do You think about Harriet The Spy (2001)?
It's surprising how mean-spirited this book is.Eleven year old Harriet wants to be a spy. She writes down all of her thoughts about everyone in a notebook she always keeps on her. She also goes around town spying on as many people as she can, learning things and always, always writing down what she thinks.This backfires tremendously when her schoolmates find her lost notebook, and read every single honest and often nasty thing she wrote about them. And just as her favorite nurse, and the only one who really deals with her on any emotional level, leaves her. Can she deal with the payback?It's a typical kid's book set-up, but it's distinguished by one of the most unlikable protagonists next to Sheila in Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. Harriet's observations aren't just ill-mannered or rude, they hurt. This is because they are deadly accurate, and virtually everyone she knows has some kind of deep-seated issue that she spied out. She finds the weaknesses of all of her classmates and even the adults around her with the trained eye of a writer. As a spy, she's a great one; but as a human being she's terrible.To a point, this is more the thoughtless cruelty of a child than the considered cruelty of an adult. But then, when she's discovered, she isn't really repentant. She's mean and she's hurt, but she learns nothing. She gets bullied, and bullies back. The worst thing about it is that rather than learn empathy or the right lesson, the book ends with her having learned nothing and the horrible lesson that it's better to lie to people if you can't apologize to them and mean it.I can't blame Harriet fully though. Virtually every adult in this book is unlikable to a degree. Sport's dad is a worthless layabout. Harriet's parents don't really seem to be a part of her life, with Ole Golly as a surrogate mother/friend to her. Ole Golly is a good nurse, but a bad person; she manages Harriet, but really doesn't confide in her. Or even care that much. Most of the adult portrayals save for the man with twenty-seven cats are negative in some manner. Harriet is a child who is outside the world as an observer. No one ever seems to truly bring her inside some place, and I think this is what created the thoughtless, hurting, and even mean child that she is.It makes for an unsettling book for those of us who read it late in life. Like a children's version of those interminable adult literary novels where everyone hates each other and you get depressed after reading it. You dislike Harriet's thoughts, because any empathy in them towards others is dangerously absent. But you also dislike the payback she gets, because she's obviously in pain and it also makes her even nastier to have the sole things in the world that she draws pleasure from (earlier, Ole Golly, later, her notebook) taken away from her. And you dislike the lack of lesson at the end, because Harriet needs to change and become human. She needs to grow if just to save herself.
—D.M. Dutcher
I started reading early and started reading beyond my age level very quickly, so I was pretty much beyond children's books way before I was done being a child. Sometimes it seems like I went directly from Dr. Seuss to Grimm's Fairy Tales and then on to adult books. But this was one children's book that truly changed my life.The book is about a little girl who fancies herself a spy, and keeps a "secret notebook" full of observations about her family, classmates and neighbors. I imagine that most little girls who read this book started their own secret notebooks. I certainly did, and never stopped, though mine came to be called a "journal" and later, a "blog." Plain and simple, this is the book that started me writing, and I never stopped. Harriet the Spy was truly a Book That Changed My Life. It's a great gift for a young girl or boy, plus the illustrations are great.
—Jenn
I loved this book as a kid. I may just have to read it again!!And read it again I did! I grew up in Harriet's neighborhood (almost) and the descriptions of the New York of my childhood almost broke my heart.Harriet is a cranky adolescent, living in a cushy New York world that was already changing when I was young and going to "The Gregory School", which was really The Chapin School, located on East End Avenue, across the street from Carl Schurz Park.The typical "brownstones" (single family, 3 and 4-storey houses) have mostly disappeared on the East Side of New York. They were replaced by enormous glass apartment towers, and modern readers of Harriet the Spy will find it difficult to understand how Harriet was able to roam around and peer into windows and skylights with such ease. At the time the story was written, the mid 1960s, much of the area had already been razed leaving rows of brownstones running down one side of the city blocks, and open lots behind, exposing private gardens and leaving fire escapes accessible to a young spy. Most of the brownstones that remain are no longer single-family dwellings, but have been turned into apartments.*Harriet lives with her parents, who almost never appear in the story. Mother is always lunching or playing bridge, and Father is at work; in the evenings they are always at parties. Harriet is left to her own devices, lovingly guided by the world's best nanny, Ole Golly. (I never really liked Mary Poppins.) Harriet's inquiring mind leads her to spy on everyone, and to write her impressions in her notebook. Her impressions are brutally honest, too honest, but Harriet is following the tradition of New York families of that time, women-folk are catty and brutal, even at the age of 12, but not in public.I think Harriet the Spy is/was so successful because it was the antithesis to stories like The Bobbsey Twins (which my mother would not allow in the house). Harriet was a modern girl in the making. She wanted a career, she didn't want to play bridge, and she didn't want to be a member of exclusive social clubs. She was like my mother (except for the bridge playing part; my mother adored bridge and taught me to play at an early age).It's a strange book, and Harriet is a strange girl, not very likable really, but what girl is likable at that age? Harriet at least does not want to change herself just to be likable, nor will she give up on her friends just because they are "Not Our Kind".I'm so glad I re-read this.* I include this clip from the film The World of Henry Orient: A Novel for more "local color". The film came out the same year as Harriet, 1964.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVUPxR...- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - p. 27Harriet’s school was called The Gregory School, having been founded by a Miss Eleanore Gregory around the turn of the century. It was on East End Avenue, a few blocks from Harriet’s house and across the street from Carl Schurz Park.
—Hayes
