Emily’s Runaway Imagination

Beverly Cleary's Emily's Runaway Imagination is a small-town story for 7 year olds about a girl who decides her town ought to have a library.

What happens

Emily Bartlett's town is Pitchfork, Oregon. Her house has thirteen rooms, three balconies and banisters made for sliding down. Half the rooms have no furniture in them, so the family just sleeps wherever they fancy. Sometimes on a balcony, under the stars.

What Pitchfork does not have is books.

Emily's cousin Muriel lives in Portland and writes letters that are frankly a bit much. This week Muriel went to the library. This week Muriel read Black Beauty three times. Muriel's mother calls her a regular little bookworm.

Emily would give anything to be a bookworm. She just doesn't fancy being called one.

So on a spring morning, sitting at the kitchen table trying to answer yet another one of these letters, she says out loud that it isn't fair for Muriel to have all the books. And her mother puts down the milk pans, fetches the good writing paper, and writes to the state library to find out how a town gets started.

Emily licks the stamp and thumps it down with her fist so it can't possibly fall off. This is the most important letter in Oregon.

That's the shape of the whole book. A girl who wants something, and a mother who believes in not putting things off. Around it there's a town full of people who all know each other far too well, a collie called Prince who turned up one day and was never claimed, and a grandmother's hat room full of ostrich plumes waiting patiently to come back into fashion.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Emily's neighbour Fong Quock is Chinese, and the book writes out his accent, so his r's are printed as l's. He calls the dog Plince. Emily corrects him without thinking, feels dreadful about it, and then the entire town spends the day saying Plince to her as a joke. The story is on Emily's side and Fong Quock is written with real warmth, but it's still an accent written out for laughs, and nobody in the book thinks twice about it. It arrives in chapter one. If that's something you'd rather talk about than have land cold, read the first chapter alongside your reader. If you've got a child who enjoys old-fashioned village stories, the rest of the book is very gentle indeed.

What to read next

For another Cleary child in an Oregon town where nothing exciting ever happens, Henry Huggins is in the library too. Henry is in the third grade, complaining about exactly that, when a stray dog sits down next to him and looks hopefully at his ice cream.