If you love Beverly Cleary’s books, then you’ll love reading about the author herself in the picture book Just Like Beverly: A Biography of Beverly Cleary by Vicki Conrad (illustrated by David Hohn; Little Bigfoot, 2019). My daughter, who is one that is knows Cleary’s books backwards and forwards, was delighted to learn about the author’s childhood. She immediately recognized the ideas from the books that were “just like” the things Beverly did herself as a child. Just Like Beverly is a short picture book biography that sets just the right tone as it teaches young kids about a beloved children’s author that wrote some of our favorite books.
The biography begins with single child Beverly Bunn on her family farm in Yamhill, Oregon in 1916. Some of the things these chapters mentioned were just like those from the story of the titular character in Emily’s Runaway Imagination. For example, one big part of Emily’s story is the beginning of a lending library with books for children. Beverly’s mother likewise started such library in a small room over the town’s bank! It wasn’t just that. When Beverly moved to town, my daughter was excited to read about how she played “brick factory” just like Ramona did in her books, and danced ballet like Ellen Tebbits. She was excited to point out the similarities when she saw them, and she enjoyed seeing where Beverly Cleary got some of the inspiration for her characters.
The climax of Beverly’s life seemed to be the years as she was working as a librarian in her young adult years. One day group of rambunctious boys came in. “Where are the books about kids like us?,” they asked. And this is when Beverly decided what type of books to write. She had always been a writer (like some of her characters!), but now she knew what she wanted to write about. She started with a boy just like those who wanted a story, and she named him Henry Huggins. The rest, as they say, is history.
Learning about Beverly Cleary encourages kids to think about the unique things they do in their lives that could make a fun story. Just like the title suggests, Cleary wrote books that were full of characters “just like” real children in their lives. She lived to be 104, so she covered a lot of ground as to what real children were like. Somehow, she got the characters just right, every time.
