Book Review: Off the Bookshelf
Louise Fitzhugh
Reviewed by Tim Walker, Fri., Dec. 8, 2000
Harriet the Spy
by Louise FitzhughDelacorte, 300 pp., $15.95
What do popular kids make of stories like this? Maybe it doesn't matter since they have each other for company. But for those of us who were too strange (or too bright, too rich, too poor, too clumsy ...) during the harrowing elementary and middle school years, books like Harriet the Spy are a godsend. Harriet is the brightest girl in her class, intent on being a real spy and a real writer. An only child, she goes around after school spying on a circuit of four households within walking distance of her brownstone on the Upper East Side. Her observations -- about her spying targets, about her friends and enemies in the sixth grade, about life -- all go into the green composition notebook she carries everywhere. Though it is clearly marked "PRIVATE," the notebook is of course read by those friends and enemies when it falls into their hands. More an outsider now than ever, Harriet must cope with the spite of her classmates and a lack of comprehension from her kind but distracted socialite parents. Fitzhugh is gentle but unsparing in her portrayal of the mixed innocence and malice of pre-adolescents, and she steers Harriet wisely through her crisis to a believable resolution. Re-reading this book 20 years later reminds me of how much I needed it when I read it the first time around.
