Fairy Tale Spotlight: Crenshaw [Book Review]

"Crenshaw" is a book written by Katherine Applegate. It was published in 2015. It is intended as children's literature, but it's a completely safe book for adults as well. I think part of the reason for this is because it sounds like the voice of the main character is an adult telling the story of what it was like to be a child.

The story here centers around a boy named Franklin whose family is going through a heck of a lot of financial difficulties. He even has to be homeless for a little bit. The main tug of the book comes from the fact that he has an imaginary friend named Crenshaw, who is an oversized cat. Franklin is actually a very logical thinking boy who wants to be a scientist someday, but he is somehow seeing this walking talking cat that should not exist. That was really interesting to me.

Despite the story being about a boy who is trying to figure out if his imaginary friend is real or not, the bulk of the story is about his family's financial woes. There are actually not a lot of scenes with Crenshaw in it, which I found rather surprising. It's always lingering, but it just doesn't get addressed that often.

What this story mainly focuses on is the very realistic portrayal of what it is like to be a homeless child still living with your family. It's pretty rough and it never sugar coats anything. I admit to getting slightly depressed over this one.

I'm not really complaining though, because I actually think this is a good book. It just isn't what I expected. There is something so amazingly sincere about this book. It feels real. Apparently the author talked to a lot of homeless children while doing research for this book. By the way, I am going to recommend this, but I still want to mention a few things I thought were interesting.

For one, the father's name was Thomas Wade. Guess what?! That's my name! It was so weird seeing my name pop up in the story. It was surreal. I double-taked. The author only mentioned this once. In fact, the author tends to be a little shy about what information she actually releases as the story goes on. It's like she doesn't want to over describe anything. She just sort of sprinkles things in as the story goes with very few redundancies if any at all.

For example, I was wondering where this story was set. In one part, they mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge, and that cleared a lot of things up. San Francisco in 2015. This makes so much sense all of the sudden. Once again, I'm not really complaining. I will say, however, that this family could have really done themselves good by just leaving their state. Heck, they could have left their city and things might have improved.

All personal opinions aside, this is a good book. I did enjoy it. Once again, I do recommend it. It is a very sweet story about a family that just won't call it quits no matter what comes their way. I found it to be quite touching and brimming with sincerity. (But seriously, kid, get the heck out of there!)

This blog was written on December 24, 2024.

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