The Story of Appleby Capple

I am starting to realize that complaining that "it's so hard to find old Newberys" and then discovering that there is some ridiculously easy way to find them has started to become a theme of this blog.

- First, I found that celebration of women authors website with the entire text of like five of my missing Newberys. 

- Then I discovered some online library where I could virtually check out books and read about four more for free. 

- Just last year, I realized that my bro-in-law is a student at a university with lots of old Newberys and I could read a few every time I visited (though that one does give me a deadline and it's usually a short time period when I want to be spending time with family). 

- My latest discovery is perhaps my most ridiculous oversight. See, my dad has a special "readers" library card at the university just ten minutes from his house (University of Utah) and he's always checking out these whackadoodle books about quantum physics and conservation biology. While visiting him this summer, he casually said that his library might have some of my missing Newbery books and that he would check one or two out for me if I was interested. ?!?! I immediately demanded a laptop and his login information and they had ALL BUT THREE on my remaining list. We planned a trip to the library the next morning and after a considerable amount of discussion, he finally allowed me to check out THREE books (he can only have a max of five checked out at a time and really didn't want to give up some of the books he was reading. "Dad, you can just check them out again when I leave town in 8 days." "But I'm at a really interesting part of my vermicomposting reference book!" "This was YOUR idea, Dad!").

My first quick summer vacation read was The Story of Appleby Capple, the only Newbery written more recently than the 1930s that I have needed to read for the last decade! The author attempted to write an entire novel divided into alphabetic chapters: The first chapter was focused on A and most of the main characters and animals and themes in that chapter started with A. The second chapter was B and so on. It made for a meandering, far-fetched story with lots of hard-to-remember names. And poor Appleby is a little boy who is lost for the entire story and the only people looking for him are ancient, distant relatives. SPOILER: They finally spot a Zebra butterfly in the last chapter.

It has actually now been many months since I read this book so I don't remember much. But one night while I was reading, my 7-year-old joined me and read a couple pages aloud for his 20-minute nightly reading and I distinctly remember us both laughing out loud at one part. So . . . there's that.