Emily’s Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary

• 11/07/2013
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Emily’s Runaway Imagination
Beverly Cleary
HarperTrophy (2000)
ISBN 9780380709236
Reviewed by Matthew Feliciano (age 8) for Reader Views (1/09)

“Emily’s Runaway Imagination” is about a young girl named Emily who lives in Pitchfork, Oregon.  Pitchfork is a small town with not that many people.  Only a few people have cars, which is strange, and they uses horses to get around.  Emily has a very active imagination which she uses when she is bored, with a lot of nothing to do.  The worst thing about Pitchfork is that there is no library.  Emily’s cousin Muriel read “Black Beauty” from her library and that made Emily jealous.  So Emily and her imagination started to find ways to bring a library to pitchfork.

One of the crazy things Emily does is she tries to Chlorox her father’s horse to make it white instead of black.  I think it is strange that a kid was able to get her hands on bleach and do all of that without her parents knowing.

Thanks to her mom’s help, Emily is able to get a library in her town after they write a letter to the mayor. But nobody brings “Black Beauty,” so Emily uses money she won to buy it herself.  I liked Emily a lot because she was very real, but I didn’t understand a lot of her imagination.  Plus, there were too many people in the book and I got lost sometimes trying to keep up.  Either way, it was fun to read “Emily’s Runaway Imagination” by Beverly Cleary, about a kid with a crazy imagination and to see what life was like before television.  I don’t know what I would do if there was no library where I lived and I think it’s cool that Emily got one.