04/24/20
I put this on my reading queue after I heard the news about Andrew Clements’s passing last year. Andrew Clements was one of my favorite authors as a kid. His stories were similar in style & shape, yet captured in their own ways [what I thought of as] the essence of childhood. If it had a cover illustration of a kid holding an object, it was going to be something special. That’s just how it was.
Although my copy of The Losers Club didn’t have a cover illustration of a kid holding an object, it was still classic Clements, and I loved it. I love Andrew Clements’s slightly-informal, simple yet distinct style of writing. (Like how he asks questions to explain people’s thought processes? That’s just one of his mechanisms for keeping things moving, keeping readers interested.) I love the way his characters are young and well-meaning despite their plot-necessitated missteps. I love his renditions of childhood and school as pastel pieces of straightforwardness (relatively speaking), the sense he gives me that the world is full of solicitude, that I can be who I want to be without crippling fear of judgment. I love that Andrew Clements shows how much of an impact an industrious kid with an idea can make – that he drives a story with it, in fact.
I love the way he makes the world feel small for just another moment.
So The Losers Club? Pretty cool book. It’s about a child who loves reading to the extent that it’s all he wants to do with his time. In typical Clements fashion, he comes up with a brilliant idea to help realize this goal, only to find that his idea ends up becoming bigger than he had anticipated. The story follows in the footsteps of Frindle, The School Story, The Janitor’s Boy, The Last Holiday Concert, A Week in the Woods, Lunch Money, and The Report Card. If you liked those, you’ll probably like this one too. It’s from the same realistic universe.
While I think The Losers Club is unlikely to be particularly life-changing or memorable for an adult cemented in his experiences, I really appreciate this book as a reminder of what it felt like to be a child, unconscious of so many sobering truths in the sort of way that makes it easier for one to be kind and open and happy. I recommend The Losers Club to anyone who wants to be taken back to that time, placed back in that elementary school nucleus of dynamism and profundity.
Thank you, Andrew Clements, for writing such sunlit human stories. Rest forever in a well-deserved peace.