To Do with a Book: Homer Price and Centerburg Tales by Homer Price

If you need a good laugh and have not yet discovered the chapter books by Robert McCloskey, please do yourself a favor and acquire Homer Price and its sequel, Centerburg Tales.


McCloskey is better known for his wonderful picture books such as Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal, but Homer Price is one that will have you chuckling along and wishing you could go back and grow up in small-town mid-20th century Ohio, as McCloskey did and recounted in such rich and delightfully warped detail.    Homer Price and sequel Centerburg Tales are a series of great story/vignettes, many with a ridiculous twist.

I especially enjoy the Greek names many characters have--Homer, Uncle Ulysses, Uncle Telemachus, and the like--as well as how some of the stories are Greek myth retellings, such as the story "Mystery Yarn," a backwards but cute version of the story of Hippomones besting Atalanta in a race with the golden apples.

What reminded me of these wonderful books was a recent garden "issue" at our house that brought to mind the Centerburg Tales; the story "Experiment 13."  In the story, Dulcy Dooner inherits from his scientist uncle a batch of seeds labeled "experiment 13."  Thinking they might be valuable, Dulcy plants and nurtures all summer several of the precious seeds.  When they turn out to be a giant version of ragweed, the fun of the story begins--how  10-year-old Homer helps to solve the issue is one I won't give it away.

At our house, earlier this summer the gardening duo at our house, my husband and 10-year-old daughter, discovered several small bush-like plants growing. They brought a small cutting to the local nursery, and a worker told them it was "probably mums."  He directed them to cut the "mums" back later in the summer, and they should bloom in the fall.

Well, the "mums" just kept getting bigger and bigger, even after the gardeners cut them back.  When they started to get the beginning of a seed head (nothing like a mum), we started to get suspicious.  We actually talked about Centerburg Tales at the dinner table, wondering if we had in fact giant ragweed on our hands.  After a quick check of Google, we discovered, in fact, we did.  And here's the photo to prove it.   We cut them all down and disposed of them right away, sparing the neighborhood and our family many sniffles, we hope.

Let me clarify here that, what I recommend "to do" with a book like Homer Price and Centerburg Tales is not growing giant ragweed, either on purpose or by accident.

Much better, and more delicious, is making some form of doughnuts, as an homage to the Homer Price story "The Doughnuts," in which the doughnut machine Uncle Ulysses buys for efficiency at his lunchroom won't stop making doughnuts.

When our Girls Book Group read Homer Price several years back, a mom with a fryer supervised making a giant batch of funnel cakes for the girls to enjoy.  Here are just a few of them:

We also had old-fashioned sodas, as you can see in the foreground of this photo, and the funnel cakes were a big hit, as you can see from the girls sampling them:

Have you read Homer Price? What is your favorite of the stories?