The Long Secret (Harriet the Spy Adventures) [Hardcover]

Louise Fitzhugh (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 10 and up | Grade Level: 5 and up | Series: Harriet the Spy Adventures

Harriet the Spy refuses to become ruffled when an unidentified person starts leaving disturbing notes all over the quiet little beach town of Water Mill. She’s determined to discover the author of the notes. And she drags her friend, mousy Beth Ellen, into all kinds of odd and embarrassing situations in her efforts to reveal the culprit. Observing in her own special, caustic way with her ever-present notebook, Harriet the Spy is on the case. But will she be ready to face the truth when she finds it?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following up on last fall's reissue of Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Delacorte is reissuing two continuing adventures featuring Harriet and her gang. In The Long Secret (1965), Harriet becomes intent on uncovering the identity of the person who is penning anonymous proverb-like notes all over town that betray a keen insight into the addressees. Money isn't everything, as Harriet's best friend learns in Sport (1979). After Sport's grandfather dies, leaving him millions of dollars, greed draws out Sport's mother, who kidnaps him. How can Sport return to life as it was before?

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

?Breezy . . . [yet] sensitive and realistic.? ?School Library Journal

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 10 and up
  
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (May 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385327846
• ISBN-13: 978-0385327848
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,267,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louise Fitzhugh was born in Memphis, Tennessee on October 5, 1928. She was the only child of attorney Millsaps Fitzhugh and Louise Perkins. After attending an exclusive girls' school, Miss Hutchison's, she attended three different colleges but never obtained a degree, and traveled in Europe, before finally settling down in New York City to pursue a career as a painter. In the late 1950s she and a friend, Sandra Scoppetone, began work on a beatnik parody of Kay Thompson's Eloise, which was published in 1961 as Suzuki Beane. In 1964 she published her first novel, Harriet the Spy. Although it received mixed reviews from adults at the time, today it is widely regarded as a forerunner to the sort of realistic children's fiction that would dominate the late 1960s and 1970s. Two novels about Harriet's friends followed: The Long Secret in 1965 and Sport, published posthumously in 1979.
Contemporary social issues figured prominently in much of Fitzhugh's work for children: Bang Bang You're Dead was a 1969 picture book with a strong anti-war message and Nobody's Family Is Going to Change (1975) explored both women's rights and children's rights. Ironically, it became the basis of the Broadway musical The Tap Dance Kid with the book's minor male characters taking a lead role, thereby completely overshadowing Emma, the female protagonist. Needless to say, this happened after Fitzhugh's untimely death in 1974 at the age of 46. After her death, three picture books were also published: I Am Three, I Am Four, and I Am Five.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I LAUGHED UNTIL IT HURT!, December 13, 2000

By 

BeatleBangs1964 (United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Long Secret (Library Binding)

I got this book when I was a child and I thought it was a scream! I actually laughed so hard it hurt!

Beth-Ellen, Harriet's shy and retiring friend is the perfect foil to the outspoken, brash, wonderfully assertive Harriet of Harriet the Spy fame. Both girls have summer homes in Water Mill, Long Island, their families' retreat from Manhattan when school gets out. Beth-Ellen lives with her kindly grandmother, who has some rather neanderthal ideas about imparting information concerning puberty, but who is a nice sort after all.

Harriet has not put down her pen and notebook. Seems that somebody else has taken up writing that summer. Quotes from the Bible and parodies of Scripture are seen throughout the Water Mill community. Naturally suspicion turns to a summer girl named Jessie who aspires to be a preacher when she grows up. Chock full of Biblical knowledge, Jessie has a morbidly obese mother and twin brother and a cute preschool sister. There is no mention of a father.

Beth-Ellen, on the other hand becomes reacquainted with her mother. Seems that Beth-Ellen's mother was a society lady, preferring parties and travel to raising a child. Beth-Ellen's natural father left some years earlier.

The reunion is a bust. Beth-Ellen's mother, Zeeney, is just as flighty and superficial as ever. Her stepfather just says "hup" and loves martinis. They try to make Beth-Ellen over, straightening her hair and choosing her clothes and insisting that she leave her grandmother and come with them. Beth-Ellen refuses, wins her case and Harriet cracks THE case -- the identity of the Secret Writer!

This book is a riot!

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Serious Book for Serious Children -- Of All Ages!, March 22, 2002

By 

tonyscam "tonyscam" (Fort Worth, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Secret (Harriet the Spy Adventures) (Hardcover)

If you want to keep your kids dumb, silly, sticky-faced, and ready to swallow everything our current corporate-media society is ready to throw down their throats for the rest of their lives, don't let them read this book -- get them Helen Ericson's soulless Harriet Spies Again instead.

Would you let your children read Shakespeare? Would you let them read Dickens? Hubert Selby? Charles Bukowski? Would you let them listen to Lennon or Lou Reed or Dylan or Pink Floyd? Would you let them eat organic brussels sprouts? Would you take them to Bryce Canyon? Would you give them a camera? Would you let them close the bedroom door? Would you let them cry without giving them "something to really cry about"? Would you turn off the TV? Do I sound like a pseudointellectual yet?

It's a seriously great book. I'm a cranky thirty-year-old guy who cries as I root for Beth Ellen Hansen to find herself. I find Harriet M. Welsch even funnier as a supporting character than I did in her starring role. I long for a wise Rodger Welsch to set me straight without spoiling my innocence, and I gape in awe at Mrs. Welsch's wit in the face of the appalling Zeeney. Thank you, Grandmother, for not making me go to Paris. Thank you, Janie, for dispelling my superstitions. And thank you, Harriet, for busting me!

Thank you, LOUISE! Rest in peace -- since ghosts evidently do not have the power to possess living writers.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, a must read, March 20, 2001

By 

*Abby Lyon* (Baltimore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Secret (Library Binding)

In third grade my third grade teacher decided to read us the beginning of "Harriet the Spy." While she got as far as when Janie tells Harriet about dancing school, she had the sequel, "The Long Secret", in the book corner of our classroom, and only one person knew about it: me. Since that day in third grade when I noticed the copy, I've read it a hundred times if not more. Who can't resist the rough and tumble Jenkins family or Zeeney or Wallace ("Hup!"). Or Bunny or Agatha or Harriet or Beth Ellen? Your life will be changed after reading it. Trust me.