Henry Huggins audiobook

Click here to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend. Cleary's wholesome debut novel shines with innocence in its depiction of a winsome young boy and his mischievous dog.

Published in 1950, this book takes you back to a time when an ice cream cone cost a nickel, kids bought horse meat for their dogs at the pet store, and a third-grader could run all over Portland by himself. Henry is just an average kid with a tendency to get himself into interesting situations. He finds a skinny mutt and, after checking with his mom, brings him home on the city bus. Chaos ensues. He buys two guppies at the pet shop and ends up with a bedroom full of canning jars filled with guppies. And then his mom needs her canning jars back. He accidentally loses another kid's expensive football and has to earn the money collecting nightcrawlers. His teacher gives him the lead role in the school Christmas play as a "little boy" because he's the shortest boy in his 4th grade class, but his dog and a bucket of green paint get him out of it. He decides to enter his dog in the local kids' dog show, but a series of events lead to his dog being light pink...and winning a prize. It's all normal stuff -- no superheroes, no magic -- but Cleary is such a fantastic writer that she doesn't need any of that. And her characters are realistic, mischievous, and hilarious, without being obnoxious. As a mom, I really like how each chapter is a self-contained story, instead of cliff-hanger chapters like Runaway Ralph and Ralph S. Mouse. It makes for easier bedtime reading. This is the third Beverly Cleary book I've read to my boys (ages 4 & 6), but the first one featuring a human main character. We all really enjoyed it and I plan to read the rest of the series to them. (Hopefully, we won't lose steam like we did on the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz series or Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family series.

The Luckiest Girl, Beverly Cleary's Young Adult novel from 1958, was one of my favorite books in my preteen years. After re-reading it a few months ago, I decided to read her middle grade books as research for the memoir I am writing. Henry Huggins was the first of these and the first book she published.I don't remember reading it as a child but I very well may have because it is about a boy who got a dog. I wanted a dog so much when I was in third grade that I convinced my friend across the street to say that her dog was half mine.Beverly Cleary's intention and genius was to write stories that kids in the 1950s could relate to. She had been a children's librarian and had spent countless hours talking to kids about what they liked to read. Finally she decided to write such books herself and started an entire trend.Henry Huggins is a small town, middle-class third grader who feels his life is not very exciting. He rides a bus, by himself, to the center of town every Wednesday to go swimming at the YMCA. One day while waiting for the bus home, he finds a stray dog, names him Ribsy because the dog is so thin, manages to get Ribsy home and convince his parents to let him keep the dog.The entire first chapter is full of excitement. The book goes on to relate Henry's life with Ribsy and other pets on Klickitat Street. I love that name! Every time I came to it I would say it out loud.The atmosphere on Klickitat Street is a microcosm of 1950s American small town life. The kids play, roam the neighborhood, perform in school plays and enter their pets in a dog show. From the moment that Henry gets Ribsy his life is full of exciting problems and Henry turns out to be very good at solving problems.The kids talk the way we talked in those days. "Hey, cut that out!" "Golly." "Gee whiz." " Beat it!" And even "Shut up!" to any friend who was teasing.Lessons are learned but these kids already have a moral sense, so the lessons are practical, how-to-get-along-in-life type experiences illustrated by the story rather than relayed through the mouths of adults.I think parents today could learn more about child rearing from Beverly Cleary than from any modern book on parenting. Maybe the kids could read her books on their iPhones.

A Delightful read for boys and girls!

When I was a kid and started reading Beverly Cleary' s book's, I started with the Ramona series. I discovered later that Henry Huggins was her first book.It starts with a boy meeting a dog. The funniest part is Henry trying to get the dog home on the city bus.From that adventure he goes to buying a pair of fish that have so many babies, he can no longer find a place for them.The chapter about the night crawlers creep me out still, after all this time.Another great moment is when Henry decides to enter Ribsy in a dog show.This book will find the kid in all if us, and remind us how it felt to be a kid. Great writer

2021 reads, #14. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves.First up, her very first book, 1950's Henry Huggins, which Cleary was famously inspired to write during her time as a public librarian, after listening to the neighborhood boys endlessly complain about the silly Victorian Little Lord Fauntleroy nonsense they were being forced to read at school, and asking Cleary, "Where are the books about us?" Set in Cleary's longtime hometown of Portland, Oregon (making it all the funnier that in the 21st century, the city's now mostly known for its pot-smoking indie-rock hipsters), this was the author's attempt to answer that kid's question, presenting us a flawed, dorky everyboy hero whose travails and tribulations were not of the mistaken-identity inherited fortune variety*, but more domestic adventures like the time he impulsively buys some guppies at the local pet store one day with some birthday money, the fish start breeding like...well, guppies, and Henry soon finds himself with dozens of jars lining every surface of his room and with no way to get rid of them all. (Spoiler alert: He sells them all back to the pet store, and uses his store credit to get a single catfish that won't breed in its tank.)The book's filled with silly, fluffy stories like this, which to 21st century eyes will seem like the exact kind of innocuous, sweetly innocent pieces we would exactly expect from "chapter-book" literature designed specifically for tweens between the ages of 8 and 12; so it's remarkable to reflect that, 71 years ago when this first came out, it caused a literal revolution in children's literature, leading first to mainstream acceptance of the genre (this was the same period that the Newbery and Caldecott awards changed from obscure industry accolades to part of the national consciousness), then to the genre's maturity (The Catcher in the Rye, arguably the world's first YA novel, came out exactly one year after this book, Lord of the Flies three years after that, and Blume's first novel 15 years after that), and eventually to the genre's commercial ascendency (the first "Harry Potter" book was released almost exactly 50 years after Henry Huggins). Those are some giant footprints for a self-admitted shy homebody like Cleary, and it's pretty remarkable that she not only caused all this to happen, but actually lived to see the entire thing. All this should be kept in mind when actually reading her books, which at least in this first case was a story I suspect modern kids will have a harder and harder time connecting to from this point forward, much like how Booth Tarkington's old "Penrod" children's stories also once used to sell in the millions and now are barely remembered. If you're ever going to read Cleary's books with an eye towards them being relatable to contemporary kids, right this second would be the time to do so, because I suspect this soon won't be the case ever again.*And indeed, one of the aspects of this book I only appreciated here in my middle-aged reapproaching of it is that Cleary acknowledges this schism in children's literature right in the story itself, by devoting a chapter to the kids at Henry's school being forced to perform a Christmas pageant based on one of these hoary old Victorian tales, in which Henry is forced to play a pajamas-sporting five-year-old whose dialogue consists of such mortifying lines as "Good night, dearest Mother!" and "Ho hum, my am I sleepy!" This is essentially what all children's literature read like back in the late 1940s when Cleary wrote this book, and it was quite clever of her to include the reference in her own updating of the genre.The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991)

I forgot how much I loved this book. Henry Huggins brings back good memories of being a kid. Like Henry, my friends and I spent our time outside, and usually had some fun project going. Henry just seems like the kind of boy that every kid would want for a friend. He had a great dog, good business sense, and a lot of spunk. This is a great book for kids and a fun way for parents to remember the joys of being a kid.

I am currently working my way through a Beverly Cleary boxed set with my nearly 6-year-old boy. We moved on to Henry Huggins after finishing the motorcycle trilogy. Personally, I think Huggins is considerably better. Both Henry and Ribsy are genuinely likeable, and the scrapes they get into are both innocent, believable, and amusing. As each chapter encapsulated a complete short story, it also worked better as a read-aloud. As an adult I enjoyed the nostalgic aspects of the book. It is set about the time my father was growing up (1950) and only a few miles from his boyhood home, but Portland was a Very different place back then. A place where an 8 year old boy could ride the city bus to the Y and go swimming for an hour, stop at the drugstore for a nickle ice cream cone, and make friends with a stray dog - quite unsupervised and without even a cell phone to keep him tethered to Mommy's side! A place where the pet store unapologetically sold horse meat for a dog's consumption, kids were required to act in Christmas Operettas at the public school, and parents were not too terribly concerned to have their child collecting worms in the dead of night at the park a couple of blocks away. A place, in other words, I might prefer to live in! One minor quibble is that in the newest edition of the book, Henry and his friends are illustrated wearing very modern clothing. While I feel the stories are largely timeless - certainly my son found nothing off-putting about them - I felt the current clothing was jarring given that the myriad other details (see above!) are so clearly 1950's and not today. Or maybe I'd just gotten my own picture of Henry fixed in my head based on the illustrations from the version I read in the 80's... PS: Some years after I'd read this book as a child, I was shocked and a little dismayed to realize that the dog's name is RIBsy, not RISby as I had transposed it. I gave the book to my niece some years back and was quite amused to hear her refer to "Risby" just as I had! When I went to read the book aloud I was prepared to either stumble over the name every time I read it, or to go ahead and stick with my childhood error - but apparently I'm a better reader now, because it came out of my mouth as "Ribsy" every time! :)

From page one, with his gloomy outlook on life and case of third grade ennui, you can't help but love Henry Huggins. His extreme propensity for accidents, combined with complete obliviousness, firmly cement Henry as one of the most memorable characters from children's lit... at least as far as I'm concerned. I remember reading about him in grade school, wishing I had a friend like him, and asking my mom for pet guppies. She said no. Fast forward a few years and now I'm a mother identifying with my own and Henry's (I giggled every time the poor woman said, "Oh, Henry." and Henry asked, "What? It was an accident..."). I was so happy when I discovered there are a total of six books about Henry and Ribsy, a couple of which I haven't read. I can't wait to read them with my son soon, and again when he's old enough to ask for pet guppies. I already know what I'm going to say.

I had forgotten how amazingly engaging these stories are. It's a series absolutely believable and mundane daily events. Still, Cleary brings out the hilarious and deeply touching in each one with enough speed to capture a child's attention and enough detail to transport an adult back to the days of their childhood. And the illustrations in this edition are absolutely gorgeous. They have the same action and innocence that make this a story that you will come back to again and again. I can't recommend it enough for every child in your life and you.

My kindergartner has been loving these stories. Very well written and entertaining.

Read this with Theo (5) a few months ago in an optimistic beginning of reading chapter books aloud at night. I thought it might be a little "old" for him, but we both enjoyed it (I had not read it, although I've read most of her books). I have several others lined up for us (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Boxcar Children, Ramona the Pest, Ralph S. Mouse), I just need to get to it and keep at it. Bedtime is so crazy. Is there a better time to read chapter books out loud together? Ida (3) likes it too. Other suggestions for chapter books are welcome. Big print and multiple illustrations are good.

Henry Huggins (Henry Huggins #1) by Beverly Cleary (Dell 1979) (Fiction - Children's) introduces the reader to a boy in the third grade in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, all the kids walk to the school on the corner, and all families have two parents with a stay-at-home mother. Henry, of course, is Everyboy in Everytown; his hometown combines the best parts of Mayberry from "The Andy Griffith Show", Lake Wobegon, "Leave It To Beaver" (except there's no Eddie Haskell), and "Brigadoon." The Henry Huggins series grew to include a number of characters and storylines; here we learn how Henry came to have a dog named Ribsy and neighbors who included Beatrice/Beezus and her pesky sister Ramona. To a young boy, this is great stuff! When I reread this book yesterday, I recognized every single one of these stories from the deepest removes of almost fifty years. Do yourself a favor: find a boy or girl who is eight years old, and put this book in his or her hands. Even better: put that child on your lap and enjoy this together. My rating: 8/10, finished 10/12/13.