enjoyable use of language and lively descriptions, but unfortunately, and, now, shockingly, of its era in terms of racism and other prejudices

I read most of this. It’s fairly funny, about a little boy who gets into different scrapes. Think Otis Spofford. But it’s also pervasively racist, with many casual racial epithets for African-Americans, and talk of “Congo man eaters.” I got to a part where Penrod makes friends with three African-American brothers. One has a speech impediment, one is missing a finger, and I forget what was the deal with the third brother. Penrod decides he’s going to open a freak show starring the three brothers. I just couldn’t take it anymore and brought the book back to the library. I think the fact that it’s a children’s book is what makes it the most awful. ( )

This is another of those books my dad said he read as a kid. Penrod is an 11-year old boy, living in the midwest a hundred years ago. He has the kinds of adventures, one presumes, that boys had back then. I expect much of it will be foreign to today's video-game boys, but us geezers who remember Eisenhower, and whose fathers were more-or-less contemporaries of Penrod, can feel some vague sense of familiarity. Whatever, it was a fun read. I may well look into snagging the second Penrod book, Penrod and Sam.

Many years ago, also at my dad's urging, I read Tarkinton's Seventeen, and didn't particularly like it. I think I was too close to being ridiculous in my first loves myself and didn't much like reading about someone else's being similarly ridiculous. I think I might be far enough removed from being a silly 11-year old that the victories and vicissitudes Penrod experienced didn't affect me so much. As always, I'm a bit appalled as how racist we all were a century ago, but then again, looking at today's Tea Party Movement, I see that some of us haven't evolved much. Still, as I mentioned, it was a fun book.

Interesting that this book is basically a series of short stories, albeit tied together from one day to the next. My previous book, The Wisdom of Father Brown, was also short stories, and I didn't much care for that format. But I think, while they contained the same central character, they didn't flow smoothly from one to the next. I doubt anyone would say Tarkington is more of a literary giant than Chesterton, but between these two books, Tarkington wins hands down.
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Eleven-year-old Penrod Schofield, his wistful dog Duke, his friend Sam Williams, and his black neighbors Herman and Verman are the young protagonists of this investigation into how much mischief a resourceful young boy can get up to in pre-World War I Midwestern America.
Penrod likes Marjorie Jones, but he explodes the pageant in which she is a willing and he an unwilling participant, he gives her four-year-old brother Mitchy-Mitch a two-cent piece that the boy promptly swallows, and he douses her and her brother with tar—though, admittedly, he was provoked by their both calling him “little gentleman.” Despite its frequent obstacles to love, the book ends with Marjorie giving Penrod a note that reads, “Your my bow.”
For a while, the bully Rupe Collins is Penrod’s hero, until Rupe picks on Verman, when Penrod’s attitude changes toward him—and Herman and Verman make short work of the bully, anyway. Penrod has a brief career in the show business, with his acts being several rats in a box, a stray dachshund, the tongue-tied Verman and the index-fingerless Herman, plus Roderick Magsworth Bitts, who is goaded into admitting that he is indeed related, as a nephew, to the Rena Magsworth who had just been convicted of multiple murders. Penrod’s adventures also include filling the hat of his sister’s admirer with tar, because that officious young cleric keeps calling him “young gentleman.” He also succeeds in coaxing the boy out of the nicest boy in town, and does it in the boy’s own yard with his mother watching from the window.
The unreconstructed, casual racism of the American Midwest in 1914 is evident in Penrod, and someone has published an expurgated edition in this decade, though it seems to me we ought to be able to see what people enjoyed with all its warts, or leave it on the shelf. ( )

A fun set of anecdotes about 11-year-old Penrod Schofield, growing up and getting into mischief in early 20th century Midwestern America. Reminded me a bit of Tom Sawyer but in a more suburban setting. I loved his birthday visit to Aunt Sarah:

"...Boys are just people, really. ... they haven't learned to cover themselves all over with little pretences. When Penrod grows up he'll be just the same as he is now, except that whenever he does what he wants to do he'll tell himself and other people a little story about it to make his reason for doing it seem nice and pretty and noble." ( )