Book Review: The Girl Who Knew It All

Title: The Girl Who Knew It All

Author: Patricia Reilly Giff

Date: 1979

Publisher: Dell

ISBN: 0-440-42855-6

Length: 118 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Leslie Morrill

Quote: “She was going to figure out how to become Leroy’s friend, because if she didn’t, she was going to spend the summer playing with that six-year-old baby.”

This is volume two of four in a series. Some readers have met Tracy’s pen pal Casey, who rescues her from having to hang out with the obnoxious boy and the six-year-old girl, so Casey doesn’t get much of an introduction in this book.

Tracy is a child nobody wants for a friend. In real life the type is usually male, so it would be more realistic if the title were The Boy Who Knew It All. The type is a slow learner, far behind its age group, with parents who don’t give it any responsibilities so all it does is hang around annoying other people. Tracy resents a six-year-old neighbor whose name is Celeste, whom Tracy insists on calling “Poopsie,” because she and Poopsie the Pest really have so much in common. Tracy has extroversion and, instead of wanting to learn more about the world around her, she wants to be able to lead and teach without having to learn anything first. Her reading problem consists of not wanting to take the trouble to sound out words.

“Tracy, when are you going to learn to do something because it’s the right thing to do and not because someone is yelling at you?” The answer currently seems to be that poor Tracy, whose brain failed to develop in any of the ways that produce introverts’ talents, is always going to struggle with knowing right from wrong. Lacking internal senses of ethics and aesthetics, she can at best have inadequate, hard-and-fast rules pounded into her head and live in fear that disobeying the rules will cost her the respect of other people, which seems to be what’s going on in this story. Tracy is not normal. Tracy is not part of a true majority of humankind, or even of American humankind. Tracy’s natural inferiority to most people who read books is what this book has to teach children. In the 1980s I was told that there were children who liked this book and could relate to Tracy. I don’t remember which children those were. None of the ones I knew liked this book. Most libraries added the book to their shelves and there, as I recall, it stayed.

In the first scene in this book Tracy wants to direct the bus driver to speed through traffic. She also tries to impress Leroy, who is trying to impress an older boy and snubs her in much the same way Tracy snubs Poopsie throughout the book, with her cooking: chocolate icing “sandwiches” on stale rye bread. The scene that made me seriously consider burning this book rather than reselling it was the one where Tracy competes with her dog to gulp down chocolate mints. Child readers need to know that even though dogs vomit easily (and often want to eat what they failed to digest all over again, and make more mess) their reactions to chocolate can be more serious than a mere mess to clean up. I don’t think the vet and Tracy’s parents scold Tracy nearly enough for making the dog sick, but I decided to resell the book on the theory that the modern reader already knows that giving chocolate to her dog proves that Tracy is a jerk.

The question is whether you want to read about a jerk. If you do, your motive might be to find out whether the character dies, or at least, since Tracy and Casey are between grades four and five, gets thoroughly humiliated. Will people become so tired of Tracy that by the end of the book she’s begging Poopsie to let her play with Poopsie’s stuffed toy collection? Unfortunately in the 1970s people were trying to make Tracy’s kind of mental problems socially acceptable, so she doesn’t get nearly as much humiliation as she deserves.

The theory behind the writing and publishing of this book was that slow readers may identify with Tracy and try to improve. Meh. For a start, although Tracy and Casey have nice gender-neutral names and interests, they’re assigned to the wrong gender. To me the chance of a girl who really needs to identify with Tracy doing so seems small, and the chance that her story will be misdirected to a nicer sort of girl like Casey, to deliver the message that girls aren’t supposed to know anything, seems greater—though also small. Anything can happen but I don’t think this book needs reprinting.