How’s this for the real world influence of blogs? Not only did Your Humble Blogger ILL The Lemonade Trick after my Gracious Host mentioned it, but Gentle Reader Michael obtained a copy of The Limerick Trick itself, and as I happened to be over at his place, I nabbed it and read it. Like you do.
And since I didn’t say anything about the quality of the books in the last note, and my Gracious Host graciously asked, I’ll devote this note to actually talking about the books themselves, because, you know, it’s not like there’s a rule against it or anything.
I enjoyed re-reading both of the books. Lemonade was much stronger as a book, much funnier and clevererer, but Limerick was good as well. The funniest thing in the Limerick book was the limericks themselves, and I suppose the whole bit about hitting himself on the head to make them stop, which doesn’t make any sense even within the whole magic-chemistry-set framework, but is still funny. Lemonade has the magic lemonade and its effects, but also a magnificent set piece involving total chaos at a dress rehearsal for a Christmas pageant.
The lessons learned is an interesting comparison (he says, sliding into parental parody). In Lemonade, our hero is an ordinary, mischievous kid. In the course of the story, he winds up working with the nerd, a standoffish, bookish new kid in town, and the success of that winds up getting them to turn the book’s villain, the class bully, into a buddy.
Digression: My Perfect Non-Reader (who also preferred Lemonade to Limerick, by the way) attends a local public school that last year was heavily pushing the "bully-free" idea. I was vexed to discover that most of the signs referred to bullying as an ontological status: the school was free of bullies, children were exhorted not to be or become bullies, bullies were deprecated and told to stay away. Although someone who regularly engages in bullying is a bully, and there are bullies, somebody who is not a bully can still engage in bullying, and that seems to me to be a better focus of the lesson. Rather than saying that a bully is a person who, I would tell children that bullying is, and that whoever you are, you shouldn’t do it. Thus, bullies would be welcome so long as they didn’t bully, and friendly kids who bully would be unwelcome just so long as the bullying persisted. Nobody should look at a sign and think “Good, there are no bullies here”; everybody should look at the sign and think “I’d better behave”. End Digression.
In Limerick, the lesson learned is that achievements have value proportional to effort, and that you have to pay for things, one way or another. True enough, but more marmish, if you know what I mean. The other plot strand involves the three kids defending their clubhouse from other local kids. It’s complicated: the clubhouse is on a vacant lot, the owner of which shows up and demands its demolition, and just as the trio are about to sadly comply, the rival kids show up to knock it over as a show of force and contempt. The trio fight to defend their clubhouse, and inflict some bodily harm, but they are outnumbered, and the fight ends with the clubhouse in ruins and the rival gang running off, after which the owner of the lot, who is revealed to have been watching the battle, permit’s the three to rebuild the clubhouse, as he is delighted with their moxie. There’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure exactly what it is, and the depiction of violent gang war obscures it anyway, doesn’t it?
But the most important thing is this: The word constitutional does not appear in either The Lemonade Trick or The Limerick Trick! Mrs. Graymalkin extols the value of a stroll in the early evening, but she doesn’t use the word. Is this some mass hallucination? I am clearly going to have to keep going through the series to find out.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.