Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

Book Overview

Harry Sue Clotkin is tough. Her mom's in the slammer and she wants to get there, too, as fast as possible, so they can be together. But it's not so easy to become a juvenile delinquent when you've got... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375832742
• ISBN13: 9780375832741
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

Awesome!!

Harry Sue is an 11year-old girl trying to find her juvenile mother who has been in jail since Harry Sue was a little girl. She lives with her Grandma. Her grandma runs a daycare business and makes Harry Sue help out while she sits on their porch and smokes a cigar. Harry Sue is a girl on a mission. Harry Sue talks in what she calls the "Joint Jive". She ¬invented the Joint Jive and uses it all the time. There is a whole dictionary of words in the beginning of the book. She and her Road Dog (a friend that you can trust), Homer, made it up so that they could talk to each other and no one would know what they're saying. Some of the book is hard to understand because of the language. Harry Sue likes to annoy her grandma and her grandma's two helpers, Synchronicity and Serendipity. She takes her Grandma's precious little porcelain figures and holds them hostage to get things like food and water. Her bed is at the top of the stairs on a little rug. She doesn't have many friends except at school. Her only real friend is Homer. He thinks up schemes and makes them come alive. He is paralyzed from his shoulders down. He uses his tongue to do most things we do with our hands. She is very close with Homer. Harry Sue has other wacky friends like Anna, a red haired chiropractor with a lot of energy, and her friend Baba, her favorite substitute teacher. She is close with these people and gets closer with them throughout the book. I have never met anyone at all like Harry Sue. She is unique and wild. She is someone I would like to meet and spend a day with to see how she lives. I think it would be fun to interview her. I think I would learn a lot. She has taught herself a lot without her mother. She has learned a lot for not being near a responsible adult in eight years. She is an inspiring character. I liked the book a lot. I thought it sent a good message and is a great book for kids in grades 5-8. It is a very adventurous book. It makes you want to read from the beginning to the end in one sitting. It is a book that I think everyone should read at least once in their lifetime.

Saving munchkins from witches and trying to go to jail

If the world doesn't sit up and take note of Ms. Sue Stauffacher soon, I'm gonna have to start rolling some heads. It makes no sense to me that while authors like Kate DiCamillo, Joan Bauer, and Sharon Creech hog the spotlight collectively, no one's given Ms. Stauffacher her due. I suspect this may be because her last name is difficult to spell/pronounce. Perhaps she should consider a pen name. Something catchy like, Greatest Living Children's Author, perhaps. I had read Ms. Stauffacher's previous work, "Donuthead" and had been impressed. A person doesn't pull off a book lugging around the moniker "Donuthead" without some serious writing cajones. The buzz surrounding her next work, "Harry Sue" was good right from the get-go. By now I've read this book cover to cover and I am convinced that this is star material. What we have here is a children's author that's going places. Ms. Stauffacher has that rare ability to suffuse her works with hope without ever overdoing it. Even when she's giving (as Harry Sue would say) a "sucker punch to the heart", you never resent her for it. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is pure undiluted talent. First things first. If you're gonna read this book then you're gonna have to immerse yourself in a little Conglish first. See, the hero of this tale is Harry Sue. Harry Sue is a gal (YES, a gal) with a mother in jail and a father who was knifed in the joint. Her primo ambition is to be reunited with her mother (busted on an ill-placed meth lab) by becoming a steel hearted conette. Harry Sue knows all the jail lingo (she provides a helpful Conglish glossary at the book's start) but the steel heart part of the plan... well that's not turning out so well. See, Harry Sue's got a soft spot for a whole lot of different people. She currently lives with the mother of all negligent day care providers, her Granny. Granny may know how to put on a good show for the parents that drop off their crumb snatchers daily, but it's Harry Sue who's trying to find a way to bust 'em out of "Granny's Lap" (the name of the center). Along the way, she has the words of wisdom from "The Wizard of Oz" (NOT the movie), her best friend Homer Price (currently living without the use of his limbs), and her new art teacher, Baba. Things may go up and down with Harry Sue, but when you've already survived a ninety-foot drop delivered care of dear old dad, you're willing to believe that life's got a whole lot of surprises and shocks in store. This has ALL the makings of a sappy sugar-infused heartwarming puppy-dogs-and-ice-cream book. It has a girl who's mother is in jail, a quadriplegic friend, an honest-to-God Lost Boy of the Sudan, a host of adorable tots, and even a puppy at the end. Can you think of a better recipe for disaster? I mean, the quadriplegic I could maybe stomach, but a LOST BOY???? I say this and yet somehow, miraculously, Stauffacher pulls it off. Part of this has to do with the writing. When Harry

The low down on Harry Sue

Tell all your road dogs (friends you can trust), so they'll know it's worth doing time with 11-year-old Harry Sue Clotkin, the first person narrator of Sue Stauffacher's new novel. Harry Sue's on a mission to become a juvenile delinquent, so she can join her mom in prison. But her path to the hoosegow keeps getting detoured, when her heart steers her in another direction. With an homage to L. Frank Baum and Dickensian characters, Sue Stauffacher knows her away both around the joint and a good story!

Richie's Picks: HARRY SUE

The closest I ever came to being locked up was in 1974 when, as a result of parting ways with a girlfriend, I found myself in possession of an extra ticket for Joni Mitchell's appearance at the Nassau Coliseum on her Court and Spark tour. Wandering around the venue well before the start of the show, I unwittingly offered to sell the extra ticket to an undercover Nassau County cop who responded by handcuffing me, dragging me into the Coliseum security office, and stripping me. As I wasn't "holding," I was eventually directed not to do anything stupid and released in time for the beginning of the show. So, alas, I have no experience with joint jive (prison language). Fortunately for me and the younger fish (new prisoners) who get their hands on this book, Harry Sue precedes the telling of her amazing tale by providing an extensive Joint Jive Glossary so that we can understand what she's bumpin' her gums about. Harriet Susan Clotkin has learned to speak in Conglish (a combination of joint jive and English). She's hoping to soon get over her softheartedness so that she can begin a life of crime, get herself sent up, and hopefully become reunited with the mother she hasn't seen or heard from since she was five, back when her parents were both sent to prison. "Before we go any further, we have to go back. Way back. Seven years back, to the day of my accident. You can't fully appreciate the saga of Harry Sue unless you know the backstory. Every conette has a backstory. It's hard enough returning to the night that changed my life forever, but if it was up to my road dog, Homer, we'd go back even further. "You see, Homer would argue that my father, Garnett Clotkin, didn't just show up to our apartment that night swearing and spitting like a rabid dog for no reason at all. Not everyone expresses their anger with violence. Garnett had to be trained to it. " 'Maybe your granny tied his shoes too tight,' he'd offer, or 'Maybe it was her habit of dunking his head in toilet water when he sassed her.' "I say, any way you slice it, it's still bread." That fateful night, unable to convince his wife Mary Bell to take him back, Harry Sue's drunken father had angrily proceeded to throw his daughter out of the window--which happened to be seven stories up. Harry Sue fortunately ended up bouncing around in an elm tree through which she descended in a "slow motion game of pinball," ending up with "a severe case of bruising, a dislocated shoulder, and two broken ribs." Unfortunately, when her mother rushed downstairs after Harry Sue, "she forgot to put away the toy chemistry lab she'd set up on the table to make crystal methamphetamine, or crank as it's called on the street, an illegal drug she mostly used herself to stay awake while working the swing shift at the auto glass factory." Both parents gone in one fell swoop. Harry Sue's aforementioned paternal grandmother has always resented Mary Bell, the woman she believes ruined her son's life

Warm and deeply insightful

"It's time you learned something for real. Not all prisoners have four concrete walls and a steel bunk. I say prison is a lot like home. It all depends on where your heart is." There are certain characters in literature who leave a lasting effect on all who come in contact with them. This is especially the case in young adult books where the protagonists are still under the spell of adolescence and therefore subject to temptation, change, and various outside influences they don't quite understand. Unlike their fully developed adult counterparts, these fledgling youths are still learning the ways of the world and have not yet become jaded or afraid to try, to feel, or to be erratically irrational and exuberant in their actions and outlook on life. It is precisely this combination of vulnerability and strength that makes them so endearingly lovable, admirable, and timeless. In Sue Stauffacher's extraordinary new novel, HARRY SUE, the 11-year-old heroine who shares the title's name is a feisty firecracker of a girl with tough skin and an outspoken attitude. She is fiercely independent and so confident that her path is the right one that she will challenge anyone who disagrees with her --- including the school principal, her teachers, her Granny, and even her best friend Homer before the accident. With Harry Sue Clotkin, however, there is more --- much more --- than meets the eye. When Harry Sue was younger, her deadbeat father threw her out of their apartment window in order to get back at her mother, who was cooking crack on the kitchen table. When the cops came to carry the two away to prison, they were shocked to find the little girl, who had miraculously escaped the seven-story fall with only a few bruised ribs. As both parents were incapacitated, she was immediately sent to live with her grandmother, a decrepit old woman who "ran" a daycare center by keeping the children drugged with cold medicine so as to prevent any misbehaving. Not soon after, her best friend Homer hit his head on a rock while diving off a pier and became paralyzed from the neck down. At such a young age, Harry Sue had already experienced her fair share of tragedy. So, how else to wind up imprisoned like her parents or Homer than to try to get sent to the proverbial slammer herself? What better way to "do her own time" like the ones she loved than to rack up detentions at school, play tricks on her classmates, teach Granny's charges prison-talk, and keep herself as detached as possible from life's possibilities. Fortunately, with Harry Sue, nothing is quite that simple or that easy. From saving a classmate's life at school, to acting as a surrogate daytime mother to an army of "crumb snatchers," to being the rock of hope and humor for Homer in his slow-going recovery, Harry Sue inadvertently sabotages all hopes of being "locked down" and instead emerges as a role model for all who know her. By living from her heart and embracing the world around her, she learns that "do