Because of this, I knew exactly how Ralph felt, the first time he watched Keith play:
Ralph was eager, excited, curious, and impatient all at once. The emotion was so strong it made him forget his empty stomach. It was caused by those little cars, especially that motorcycle and the pb-pb-b-b-b sound the boy made. That sound seemed to satisfy something within Ralph, as if he had been waiting all his life to hear it.
Beverly Cleary knew what she was doing. She was writing directly to the reader, showing that she knew us and what our lives and feelings were like. She helped me realize I didn’t need to change myself into a detective or a knight or a Revolutionary War soldier in order to have an adventure or to be a boy. The adventure would come to me as part of the life I knew. Claiming a book about a talking mouse as a work of realism might seem a stretch, but Ms. Cleary’s magic was that she placed her flights of fancy so firmly in the lives of her very human characters that reading her stories always feels like soaring through real life. This was an inspiration to me as a reader and, later, as an author; it’s not a coincidence that I can trace back my writing career to the stories I wrote in third grade.
Keith and Ralph bond over the fact that their parents tell them they get in trouble because they don’t stop to use their heads. They talk to each other about how “you grow a little bit every day” but at the same time “it takes so long.” The big quest in the book comes not when Ralph wants to show he’s an alpha mouse, but when he needs to get an elusive aspirin for his new friend. The two of them care about each other in the way my Matchbox cars cared about each other, and that helped me understand such caring wasn’t just acceptable, but necessary.
Like Judy Blume with her Fudge books, Ms. Cleary showed readers that books about boys didn’t have to be junior versions of books about men; instead they could be tales of making it through the peculiar things life throws your way. Ms. Cleary — and Ms. Blume — also knew that once you gain devoted readers, you can take them into the better place where “boy book” and “girl book” categories have little meaning. Ralph led me to Ramona. Fudge led me to Margaret and Deenie. All of them led to me and a number of my fellow kid-lit peers (male, female, nonbinary) to becoming writers.