The Story of Lizzie McGuire, by Herself

(no dust jacket) [a modestly worn copy, with bumping to several corners, considerable rubbing to the front-board decoration, and some very slight paper loss at the upper corners of a number of pages (no impact on the text); there is some looseness in the binding, with several splits but no detached pages; one-time owner's signature on the front pastedown]. (frontispiece portrait drawing) A humorous (or meant to be) lament, in the form of a ten-day diary kept by the titular character, a self-described "sweet, dear maiden of thirty-five summers," a hefty lass of Irish extraction who has lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, her entire life. She begins her narrative by declaring herself to be "queer, very queer," but of course she means that in the old-timey sense, not as a confession of her sexuality, and right away starts in decrying her incipient old-maidenhood (which may or may not be attributable to the fact that she weighs 290 pounds, as she admits later on) and the dreariness of her hometown ("the barren wastes of my native burg") and its motley group of multinational denizens. She dedicates the book "To My Great Snakes," to which group she makes numerous references throughout -- although it seems to be kind of an all-purpose incantation (an Irish thing, no doubt) rather a reference to any particular group of people or serpents. (Example: "Great Snakes, deliver me.") It may all sound corny, but there are actually moments of real hilarity -- I especially enjoyed the entries for July Two, in which she expounds on her philosophy of eating ("my healthy, fat thirty-five years knows it all in the eating line, and don't you forget that") and July Five, in which she waxes rhapsodic over her infatuation for a prizefighter named Jimmie Flaherty, which reaches its apotheosis as she contemplates the dozen "printed, pink-tinted pictures" of the gent, all clipped out of the Police Gazette. (I should make it clear, I suppose, that this book has NO connection whatever with the early-2000s Disney-produced TV series "Lizzie McGuire," centered around a 13-year-old middle-school girl.)

Product Info

Publisher: Henry A. Dickerman & Son

Year: (c.1902)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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