We'd Like to Thank You Henry Huggins

Today is H day on Reading at the Beach's A-Z Wednesday, so I looked through my pile of unread books and found Henry Huggins, by Beverly Cleary. Now, I'm pretty sure that I've read this before, but my rule is that if I buy a new copy of a book, I should read through it because what if they printed it wrong? Or something? So I dove into this short kids book.

And found to my surprise that some chapters seemed completely new to me. I vividly remembered chapters 1, 3, 4, and 6, but found 2 and 5 to be completely fresh. Did I manage to forget them that completely? Had I read this book out loud to my son years ago, and skipped chapters he read on his own? He's only been reading independently for four years or so, which is pretty fast for me to forget things. I could have read the book as a child (and I'm fairly sure I did -- I've liked Beverly Cleary for as long as I could read). And I really liked these chapters -- Henry gets some guppies and manages to raise a zillion of them; Ribsy wins a prize at the dog show despite showing up in pink and attacking a fellow finalist. It's a fun story of a boy in fourth grade who has small problems that he mostly solves on his own, but with a supportive family watching his back. For fans of Cleary's more famous series, Henry is a peer of Ramona's big sister Beezus; the Quincy's make short appearances in this book. A-.

I'm not grading it higher because of the lingering doubts of my own mind, caused by the disappearing chapters. Surely I'm not that old...

If you want to play along, grab an H book, put up