Beverly Cleary and the Beauty of Bad Moods

At Vulture, Kathryn VanArendonk reflects on the life and work of Beverly Cleary, who portrayed children with all their complexities, tantrums, and anger included. “Cleary’s true genius was for the emotional realism she gradually developed alongside that external grounding,” VanArendonk writes. “Her characters are not just kids who play like actual kids; they are people who have problems and desires that readers will recognize. Cleary’s honesty about anger, disappointment, and jealousy, her refusal to excuse those emotions in her characters or try to fix them quickly, her willingness to tell a story about a kid in a bad mood and let everybody see exactly how bad it really is — this is what feels most revolutionary about Cleary’s work. She saw the bad moods and she saw the scarily mundane things that cause the bad moods.”