Henry and the Paper Route

Henry and the Paper Route by Beverly Cleary is a warm, funny story for 8 year olds about a boy who badly wants a job and is a couple of months too young for it.

What happens

Henry Huggins is sitting on his front steps picking the cover off an old golf ball. It is not interesting work and he knows it isn't.

What he wants is to do something that matters.

Then Scooter McCarthy rides past with his bag of newspapers and mentions that Mr Capper is after a boy to take a round. Henry says "me" before Scooter has finished the sentence.

And Scooter, who normally scoffs at everything Henry says, answers seriously that he does not think Henry could do it. That lands far harder than scoffing would have.

You have to be eleven. Henry is nearly eleven. Henry feels eleven.

So he washes his hands as far up as the wrists, combs his hair, takes the raccoon tail off his handlebars because it is not businesslike, and cycles off rehearsing his opening line on a telephone pole and then a postbox.

This is the thing Cleary does better than almost anyone. Henry is not naughty and he is not a genius. He is an ordinary boy who has decided to be taken seriously, and you can see exactly how it is going to go.

Because on the way he stops at a jumble sale. And in a cardboard box among the old lampshades there are four kittens at fifteen cents each, and a woman saying quite cheerfully that whatever is left over goes to the pound.

He knows he cannot carry kittens into a job interview. He absolutely knows it. He buys all four and zips them inside his jacket.

Then he rings Mr Capper's doorbell, stands up straight, tries to feel eleven years old, and something starts moving under his coat.

If your child has ever been desperate to be thought older than they are, they will feel this one somewhere near the stomach.

A note on register. It is mid century America, so it is cents and nickels, a paper route rather than a paper round, and a boy of ten cycling round town on his own all afternoon. Easy enough to follow, and quite a good thing to talk about afterwards.

What to read next

The two girls who stop to talk to Henry on the first page have books of their own. Beezus and Ramona is the one where Beezus tries very hard to be patient with a four year old sister who blows down her lemonade straw to see what will happen.