Reviews for Ginger Pye

The average rating for Ginger Pye based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-21 00:00:00 Kadeem Stewart A few years after my parents bought their very first house together, an entire lot of low-income apartment buildings went up on the other side of the canal behind our house. These apartment buildings became known to the residents of my neighborhood as the red apartments, (very clever indeed, as they were painted red) and this expression was typically uttered in derision and infamy, especially by us kids. Yes, we were resentful, initially, that those apartments went up directly behind our house and cast their ugly shadows on our smaller homes, so the residents of that complex already had one strike against them, but the main problem was that a majority of the kids who lived there were often bad news. They were the kids who started fist fights at our bus stop, they were the kids we would find hovered down by the canal behind our house smoking joints, and they were the kids who held me at knife point, once, at the age of 12. The truth is, there were probably a lot of really normal people living in those buildings, but they were most likely the single, the newly married, or the retired ones, and we rarely encountered any of them. It was the teenagers we needed to look out for, and I would typically walk a wide arc around the entire complex on my way home, especially if I ever found myself walking alone. I had a good childhood, but almost everything bad that happened to me as a kid was connected in some way to the residents of those red apartments. I would often complain to my parents about the shifty characters who would step out of the shadows of those red buildings and the threats they posed to my person, but it was the 1970s, and my father was just shy of invisible, gone every day from 7am to 7 pm. My mother was visibly present, but always unavailable, whether she was washing dishes, cooking a casserole or reading Cosmo. Parents were rarely concerned with “Unsavory Characters” back in those days. You were on your own. So, imagine my surprise this week at meeting Jerry and Rachel Pye, a sibling pair in Connecticut who have an “Unsavory Character” of their very own, a person who has crept out of nowhere and is determined to stalk them, mentally torment them, and then steal something quite precious from them. These kids are not totally on their own; their mother does listen to their problem and at least offers to lock the doors (it's something), and a local police officer takes their stolen property at least seriously enough to file a report, but, for the most part, the lives of this brother-sister pair become altered when they are presented with this very real problem. There isn't any violence in this book, and it was perfectly appropriate for my 9 & 12 year-old readers, but this Newberry award winning story from 1952 took me quite by surprise. I can't recall a single book for middle aged readers tackling this particular problem. The threat here is very real, and I applaud Eleanor Estes for grappling with an issue that has probably plagued many young lives throughout the years. I felt validated by this story, and my daughters were completely engaged by it, despite it being almost 70 years old. As far as I could tell, it hasn't lost any of its appeal.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-10-26 00:00:00 Mohammed Adam I read this because a couple friends and I are on a mission to read all the Newbery award winners, so I haven't read any of the other Pye books by Eleanor Estes. I mention that solely because I can't say whether reading them would have made me more or less interested in this book and, more specifically, Estes' narrative style. I had a really difficult time getting into this book. Considering the Newbery track record thus far, I'm not surprised that was the case, but I did expect a little more from this book since Estes is relatively well-known. The focus of this story jumps around quite a bit -- Ginger the dog is always involved somehow, but the chapters focus sometimes on Jerry, sometimes on Rachel, sometimes on Ginger -- I can't really put my finger on which one of those I would call the main character and so I felt a little lost at first. And then Ginger the dog gets lost and suddenly the story gets interesting. Actually -- there's a chapter right before Ginger gets lost that I found surprisingly entertaining. Ginger goes on a hunt to discover where it is Jerry disappears to every day (school) and I found that I liked Estes' imagining of what goes on inside a dog's head. It's not quite as amusing as the dogs in "Up", but it is funny. There Ginger had been -- on the trail of Jerry, to find out where he went always. And then this! This fight with a cat. He had fallen into temptation after all. What a reflection upon his character! In his shame Ginger stuck his tail down tight. He felt like a traitor, a deserter... All right. It would not happen again because he was Ginger, the purposeful dog.Ha! Rachel -- the little girl -- starts listing all the stories that make her cry, which include stories about old men. How random! But I love this: The old man in the story was so feeble he spilled all his food on himself with shaking hands. He made such a mess his family made him eat on the bench behind the kitchen stove... Rachel could hardly bear to think of that sad story ever. When Grampa got that old, she would make him eat right at the table with them all and slobber as much as he wanted.I became quite enamored with the story about halfway through the book and just couldn't put it down. Perhaps I should have given myself an hour to get into the book from the beginning instead of reading a chapter a night, as I tend to do with the Newbery winners. |Warning: Nerd Alert| And this last bit is entirely unrelated to the story, but it's one of the reasons I love reading old books. I was reading along, la-di-da, and then this caught my eye: "Papa carried Uncle Bennie pickaback most of the way up." Pickaback?! Is that where the term piggyback came from? I never much thought about it before, but piggyback doesn't really make any sense, does it? When do you ever carry a pig on your back? Or when do pigs ever carry anything on their backs? Hmmm... Well, it didn't take much digging to discover that the word pick-a-pack became pickaback became piggyback through a process called folk etymology, wherein people begin to replace a word whose meaning has been lost (pick -- to place or put) with a similar sounding word (piggy) regardless of whether or not the new word makes any sort of sense. Isn't that fascinating? Language is alive, people!