I love the example that all three of these fictional boys have been to my own boys. With Henry Huggins, Billy Miller, and now Homer Price, I feel like we've been on a small-town, average-kid, simple-adventures kick. How does this happen? He wrote the chapter! He illustrated all the other pictures correctly! What would make him add a fifth person in one picture? Maybe he did it on purpose to drive readers like me crazy. I have gone back through the chapter in search of who the fifth person could possibly be, but it appears that Robert McCloskey simply made a mistake. In the picture of all of them in the same bed, there are unaccountably five robbers.

However, speaking of the illustrations, do you want to know what galled me the most about this book? In the first chapter, the one where Homer has a pet skunk named Aroma and uses her to catch a band of robbers, it repeatedly says that there are four robbers and every picture shows four of them. The piles and piles and piles of doughnuts are just too much for this doughnut-loving family to handle. Would you expect anything less? Since I can't seem to talk enough about the doughnut chapter, I'll also tell you that I would love to get prints of some of the pictures from that chapter and hang them in our future library someday. Plus, there was just no way for it to compete with a chapter about dozens of doughnuts rolling non-stop down a chute.) That chapter required so many explanations, I was doing more explaining than reading. (I guess we just don't have much of an interest in a new housing development built in honor of old Uncle Ezekiel, nor in celebrating one hundred and fifty years of Centerburg progress. Unfortunately, the last chapter was definitely our least favorite, and combined with the long break we took in the middle of it to read Billy Miller, it just felt like it ended on a bit of a bad note. For being such a small town, Centerburg is not the least bit short on excitement.Įven with all the things they didn't understand, Aaron and Maxwell still really liked this book (and I say, as long as they're enjoying it, it's not a bad thing to get to expand the ol' vocabulary). Besides catching robbers with his pet skunk and helping out the Super-Duper, Homer is fascinated with Michael Murphy's musical mouse trap and the cookie-cutter housing development going up. Homer's Uncle Ulysses owns a diner and loves labor-saving gadgets, which is how the ill-fated doughnut machine comes to be. Homer helps out a lot, but he also likes to build radios. His father owns a tourist camp and a filling station.

Homer lives in the small town of Centerburg. And it was one of those books that had to be accompanied by a lot of explanations. That boy is nothing if not his father's child. I'm pretty sure it was the doughnuts on the cover that enticed him. He found it on one of our bookshelves and told me, 'I know which chapter book I want to read next.'

Homer price