Barthe DeClements and How It Sucks to Be a Kid

Were the books at the Scholastic Book Fair? It seems likely. The books were, after all, published by Scholastic. I had a few of them, however I acquired them. I still read them now, as an adult, and should really introduce them to my kids. Several of her books were on that border of children’s books and YA where you were dealing with difficult concepts even if the reading level of the books was fairly easy, and I think that’s an important place to get kids to read. Maybe the later ones can wait, but there are things both my kids will understand.

There is vanishingly little information about Barthe DeClements available online. She was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1920 and died in nearby Everett in 2019. She appears to have gotten a BA from the University of Washington in 1940 and then a Masters of Education there thirty years later. In the meantime, she worked first as a teacher and eventually as a school counselor. She appears to have taken up writing when she retired and published about twenty books, eventually retiring from writing as well. That’s as much as I can find about her career; she was married twice, even being widowed at twenty if the site I’m reading it from is correct, and had four kids. And that’s most of her personal life.

I can tell you a great deal more about the books, even though I have not myself read all of them. The ones that were most popular when I was growing up were the ones involving Elsie Andrews. Her story started with Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade from 1981. While the narrator of that book was Elsie’s classmate Jenny, it’s really Elsie’s story. Elsie has been kicked out of multiple schools for stealing, and Jenny’s school is Elsie’s last chance before a disciplinary school. Jenny and her classmates think of Elsie as fat and disgusting, but Jenny slowly gets to know the girl inside and come to care for her.

Elsie is, bluntly, abused by her mother. Mostly emotionally, and often through neglect, but there is at least some physical abuse as well. Elsie’s parents are divorced, and her father traded her mother in for a younger model. Elsie’s mother used to console herself with food, and trained Elsie to do the same thing, but then she got thin again and saw Elsie as a symptom of all her own failures. She bought a sports car, which only had two seats, and only ever took Elsie’s younger sister places.

Most of the books I read by DeClements had girls with similarly difficult lives. Even though Jenny seems happy most of the time, her parents fight a lot, and they end up divorced by the end of the series. Both girls are stuck babysitting younger siblings at a far earlier age than would be acceptable today, and Elsie is full-on parentified. The next book in the series, Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You (But Only If You Let It) introduces Helen, often called “Bad Helen” or simply Hell, who acts out a lot in school—and turns out to be dyslexic.

There’s something deeply comforting to the idea that you’re not alone. I don’t want to suggest that my life was as hard as Elsie’s or Helen’s, but there is no one in the stories whose life is perfect. The obnoxious Sharon is pressured to be perfect. Craddoc, Elsie’s eventual boyfriend, is frankly a toxic person but there’s a lot of weight on him from expectations as well. He’s also the sort of person who expects his mommy to fix everything, and boy is life going to slam into him someday.

One of the disappointments to me about the current state of the Scholastic Book Fair is that there aren’t any older books there. The oldest books tend to be about the same age as my son. I remember classics available when I was a kid, but there isn’t so much as the odd copy of Charlotte’s Web. But these books would, I suspect, do well with modern kids. Okay, it’s a little hard to parse that they all listen to records, but the feelings and experiences remain valid today. These books don’t deserve to be forgotten.