Cleary writes children as they are. Warts and all. But, as Diane so often says about Gary D. Schmidt, she does not leave them there. The whole point of the Ramona books is that Ramona (and everyone around her) is growing up. When the series opens, Ramona is just four years old. As she says in Ramona and Her Father (several years later) – she doesn’t try to annoy everyone. Just Beezus. According to Ramona, sometimes it is fun to annoy Beezus. But, generally, she isn’t trying to annoy everyone else. She is just trying to grow up, and as she says, no matter how old she gets, she can never catch up to Beezus or Henry or anyone else bigger than she is. Ramona has a very good heart, and she is trying to figure out who she is and who she is becoming. She makes a lot of mistakes, but she does learn from them.
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