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Wordful Wednesday: Ginger Pye

It seems my reading pace has slowed a bit from last year, but my prospects for staying on my book-a-week pace are bolstered by having several mop-up reads that I started weeks ago.

The latest is Ginger Pye, by Eleanor Estes, which I started reading to the Pancake-Eating Boy last year.

It’s another dog book, which gave it instant credibility with the Boy, though the book was a bit slow in introducing the dog.  And with that, I’ll state the negative side of things.  It’s only one item:

The chapters were too long.

I don’t mind saying that I’m a fan of short chapters.  Take a six-hundred-page book and break it into fifty chapters of twelve pages each (or seventy-five chapters of do-the-math pages), and you’ve got a fast read.  Take a three-hundred-page book and break it into only fourteen, and you’ve got a book that drags.  It also takes too long to read to make a good bedtime read-aloud.

Okay, that part’s out of the way.  It’s really the only negative I could think of.  Other than that, we both enjoyed the tale, even if the dog disappeared for a good eight to ten chapters of the book.

As for the plot, it’s fairly simple.  Jerry Pye wants a dog, but he needs a dollar to get just the perfect one from a local farm.  Adding to the pressure of earning such a vast sum (!) is the fact that there’s another interested buyer.  Fortunately for Jerry and his sister, Rachel, an opportunity arises to earn that dollar.  Just in time, Jerry buys the dog and names him Ginger. 

That Ginger is an intellectual dog soon becomes apparent, after Ginger tracks down Jerry at school, returning to his master a pencil he’d dropped on the way in.  The event is big news in their small town.  The event is also charmingly told from the dog’s perspective.

Of course, it’s also big news when Ginger disappears on Thanksgiving Day, though it’s not wholly unexpected, as the Pyes had previously encountered an Unsavory Character in a suspicious yellow hat.

Unsavory Character.  It sounded like a name.  “Unsavory could be his first name.  And Character his last,” suggested Rachel.  “Like in Colonial Times.  It sounds like those names.”

Of course, they never got a really good look at him.  They’d only heard his footsteps and seen his yellow hat (and put a crayon mark in it when it blew off his head and into the reservoir).

The rest of the book details their efforts to find Ginger Pye.  But the book isn’t even really about that.  The charm of it is in all the little side stories about Things That Had Previously Happened To Them, like why the two kids have a three-year-old uncle named Bennie.

I loved the way the book was written, because it was very kiddish.  This wasn’t a story about kids, told by an adult.  It’s as if the kids themselves tell the story.  Like when Rachel muses that since her father is a famous Bird Man, she’d like to be a Bird Man when she grows up.  And actually, though the main plot is about Jerry wanting and getting and losing and trying to find a dog, Rachel is the more important character in terms of how much of her thought comes out in the pages.  (Maybe a subtle hint from the female author about the relative number of thoughts boys or girls might have?)

Next up, in terms of read-alouds, is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  And I’m also indigesting (not a typo) Dan Brown’s latest schlock effort.