Otis Spofford

Beverly Cleary's Otis Spofford is a school story for 8 year olds about a boy whose main hobby is stirring things up.

What happens

Otis is medium-sized with reddish-brown hair, freckles and ears that stick out. He wears a leather jacket with a rabbit's foot tied to the zip. His shoelaces glow in the dark, pink on the right foot and green on the left.

There's nothing to stir up at home. He lives in a flat with his mother, who teaches ballet and tap at her dancing school above the chemist and is out most of the time. So Mrs Brewster who manages the building keeps an eye on him, and Mrs Brewster doesn't like dirt, dogs, noise or boys.

School is much better. School has options.

Once a week the class does folk dancing, which Otis hates, partly because he sees enough dancing already and partly because nobody will partner him. He hops on his right foot when he's meant to hop on his left and it's hard on their toes. So he dances alone, stiff-legged, for his own entertainment.

Then his teacher announces that the three spare boys will do a bullfight in the middle of the fiesta. Otis can see it straight away. Himself in the cape, stepping neatly aside, girls throwing flowers.

He is told he can be half the bull.

"The front half or the back half?" he asks. Everyone laughs, which is really the point. He gets the front.

George gets the toreador suit. Velvet knee pants, a velvet hat and a cape that used to be somebody's evening dress. George doesn't walk anywhere, he swaggers, and he says "Adios" to the room. Otis says "Chili con carne" back, that being the only Spanish he knows, off the tins his mum opens when she's in a rush.

Within a minute of getting his costume, Otis pokes George in the seat of the velvet pants with the bull's horns.

What makes it funny is that Otis isn't nasty, he's just completely unable to leave anything alone. He teases Ellen Tebbits most of all, for no reason he can name, except that she's neat and well behaved and he can always get a rise out of her. The book is quietly clear that this will catch up with him.

One thing your reader may trip over. It's an American school from a long time ago, so there's a P.T.A., costumes made of gunny sacks, and a playground rhyme about a cuspidor, which is a spittoon.

What to read next

For another ordinary boy whose ordinary afternoon gets away from him, Henry Huggins starts with an ice cream cone and a dog who badly wants it.