Free Book Review: ‘Penrod' by Booth Tarkington

Penrod tests home-made Smallpox medicine on a rival.

Free Book Review highlights public domain books you'd actually pay for if you had to.

Penrod, published in 1914, initiates readers in the secrets of the worst boy in town. (Population: 135,000.) The 11-year-old hero is more than a caricature ala Dennis the Menace, though. He's a compressed storm of human emotions — pride, jealousy, love and humiliation — familiar to adults but fresh to children. Never has an author written about young boys with greater insight and empathy.

Before putting this book on your kids' holiday reading list, however, read it yourself. Much has changed over the past century, and here's an abridged list of sit-down discussion topics Penrod might prompt:

—Racism
—Cruelty to animals
—Prescription drug abuse
—Slander
—Alcoholism
—Bullying

To his credit, Tarkington stands firmly in Penrod's corner throughout his misadventures and reveals his motives. Set in a time when corporal punishment governed American children, few of Penrod's adventures end without a lashing, but Tarkington questions the justice and efficacy of the rod.

This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime — he never knows.

Penrod's dense prose proves a minimalist style isn't always better. Tarkington builds the book with scholarly phrases and euphemisms, telling each story the way Penrod could if he had the words. Absurd situations like a tar-fight in the street are conveyed with straight-faced gravity, reminding the reader the power of emotions as felt by an 11-year-old boy.

The brevity of each story offsets the sophisticated style, though, and I had no trouble finishing the book. Rather than bend Penrod's tale to an adult's attention span, Tarkington instead stitched together a series of semi-related short stories to form a pleasing whole. The format suits the main character, whose life itself is a string of fits and phases. Penrod bounces back from the consequences of his exploits, no matter how spirit shattering or publicly humiliating. The author explains this remarkable resilience:

With a boy, trouble must be of Homeric dimensions to last overnight. To him, every next day is really a new day.

Though there's no overarching plot, the somewhat sudden ending is powerful enough to satisfy the reader.

Penrod reminds us that emotion is universal, love can be new and the best stories come from a bold life. Though nearly a century has passed since Penrod's glorious 12th birthday, there are still some lessons you can only learn from the worst boy in town.

Penrod is freely available for download in multiple formats from Manybooks.net and Gutenberg.org. An audiobook of questionable quality is available from Librivox.org.