Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I’m honestly not sure what to think.

I liked it, yes.  It was (more or less) a coming-of-age story about a girl escaping a bad situation and the hobo who takes her under his wing; details of life as a hobo during the Depression are plentiful.  My issue is that it’s shelved in the same section of the library as, say, Lunch Lady and the Mutant Mathletes, its successor in my bathroom drawer.  Lunch Lady is an easy, fun read for my almost-7-year-old (although to be fair, my 9- and 12-year-olds read the series too); Soupy deals with ideas and a setting that feel more appropriate for my 12-year-old.  There’s nothing inappropriate, mind you–it’s just that I don’t think my 9-year-old is going to connect with it on the emotional level that it’s going for.  My guess is that it’s classified as JGN instead of YGN because it’s clean enough for the younger audience, and I find myself frustrated by what that implies about our culture.

(Also–spoiler alert!–it feels like quite the stretch for 1932 to have all of the hoboes we come to know by name have either money squirreled away or family to fall back on when necessary.  Pearl’s situation in the last 50 pages seems ridiculously lucky, and the reviewers who point out Castellucci’s extremely romanticized view of ‘riding the rails’ during the Great Depression aren’t wrong.)

Ultimately, I liked this but didn’t love it (and oh, I wanted to!), and I think it’s going to give readers old enough to relate to it a false view of an era that deserves more than that.  On the other hand, pairing it with a book that highlights the difficulties hoboes faced during the Depression could make for a worthwhile teaching tool.  With the right counterpoint, it might capture reluctant readers/history students in a way other stories might not, but it definitely needs something to balance it.