Bernadette has many brothers and lives in a gloriously messy and chaotic home.
There is a delightful subplot about one of Amy’s friends, Bernadette, whose family life is utterly unlike Mitch and Amy’s. Huff walked into the bedroom with the three library books… Perched on the foot of his bed to watch the comedies, and just at a funny part, whereĪ curly-haired woman was trying on a pair of skis in her living room and was knocking …he watched a nursery-school program, which was followed by an exercise program,Ī man interviewing some famous but boring people, and several old comedies. Cleary is never heavy-handed, and she is often funny, as in this wry description of mid-century TV programming: Far from being irrelevant, they could easily be compared today to the much more pervasive effect of other media. There are numerous references to the distractions of television. Only at the end are readers asked to connect the dots, when Mitch and Amy realize that constant comparisons to his intellectually gifted father, especially for a boy who finds reading difficult, may have influenced the development of his personality. (The book takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area.) Most of the other kids in the book, including Mitch and Amy Huff, have less illustrious parents. A key part of Alan’s identity is that is father is a world-famous professor at the University. He destroys the skateboard which Mitch built for himself, and steals cupcakes meant for Amy’s Girl Scout troop. The twins also need to support one another through attacks by a classic bully. The intervening years between the novel’s first appearance and now have done little to date these problems. Mitch struggles with reading, while Amy finds learning arithmetic to be a torment. Mitch bothers Amy and her friends, they playfully belittle each other in ways that can cross the line from funny to hurtful, and their strengths and weaknesses are complementary. Mitch and Amy Huff fight over many typical sources of conflict. However, the book radiates empathy for the experience of having one sibling of the same age.
How much of that experience is reflected in her novel Mitch and Amy, about twins who are very different in spite of the strong bond they share, is hard to know. Beverly Cleary (1916-2021), was the mother of boy and girl twins.
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