Last night I took a break from packing and read The TV Kid<\/i>, written by Betsy Byars and published in 1976.<\/p>\n

No matter how many books I had access to growing up, there was always something magical and exciting about ordering new ones from the Scholastic order forms at school. Few choices were more gut-wrenching than narrowing down which books to order from those colorful quarterly pamphlets, each one filled with lists of new releases, best sellers, and old favorites. In each one I would circle a dozen books I hoped to purchase, which my mom would help me narrow down to two or three. I’m a creature of habit, and I’m sure most of the books I ordered fell into one of the following categories: Star Wars books, the latest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Sequoya books, and something written by either Judy Blume or Betsy Byars.<\/p>\n

Both Blume and Byars wrote about the lives of elementary school children and young teens, and while Blume may have penned more memorable characters (like “Fudge”), Byars had a way of capturing scenes that have stuck with me my entire life. In fact, it was a memory of one of those scenes that led me to track down a copy of The TV Kid<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In the book, a young boy named Lennie spends his days struggling with school and helping his single mother run the roadside motel she’s inherited. His only escape from his failing grades and work at the motel is television, be it cartoons, game shows, or commercial jingles. <\/p>\n

Halfway through the book while hiding underneath a wooden porch, Lennie is bitten by a rattlesnake. After cutting open the wound, attempting to suck out the venom, and applying a tourniquet (three actions that are no longer recommended<\/a>), Lennie is eventually discovered and taken to the hospital.<\/p>\n

I vividly remember reading this scene as a child. The image of being bitten by a snake and being alone with no adults around terrified me. The memory of that scene was to strongly embedded in my brain that at times I had to remind myself it came from a book and hadn’t happened to someone I knew in real life!<\/p>\n

One of the things I learned in college is that the number of words a writer spends on a particular event reflects its importance. I did not remember this at all, but literally half the book’s 128 pages<\/i> are about the snakebite. I did not remember just now much of the book revolved around this single incident; perhaps that’s why I remembered it so clearly.<\/p>\n

By the end of the book, having survived the bite and gone through a painful stay at the hospital, Lennie discovers there are more important things to life than daydreaming, flunking science class, and most importantly, television.<\/p>\n

Some parts of the book have aged better than others. Most disappointing was the lack of real character development. Lennie likes television, he gets bit by a snake, and then he doesn’t like television. Without totally picking apart a book written forty years ago for young teens, I’ll just say that big parts of Lennie world and surrounding characters aren’t fleshed out, something that wouldn’t fly with modern readers.<\/p>\n

But as a kid, none of that mattered to me — or if it did, I’ve long forgotten those parts. What stuck with me was the pain and anguish Lennie went through after being bitten by that snake. For several chapters, Lennie runs the gamut from fear and guilt to panic and agonizing pain. It’s those chapters that made such a strong impact on me that they’ve stuck with me for almost forty years. Every author should be so lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I took a break from packing and read The TV Kid, written by Betsy Byars and published in 1976. No matter how many books I had access to growing up, there was always something magical and exciting about ordering new ones from the Scholastic order forms at school. Few choices were more gut-wrenching than narrowing down which books to order from those colorful quarterly pamphlets, each one filled with lists of new releases, best sellers, and old favorites. In each one I would circle a dozen books I hoped to purchase, which my mom would help me narrow… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11533"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11535,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11533\/revisions\/11535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}