It's a Homer!

It’s National Doughnut Day, which feels timely, as we’ve got Homer Price and his fabulous doughnut machine on our minds.

Every year we spend an intense week figuring out which books to LitWit next. We pore over recommendations from our customers, subscribers, and friends; we thumb through classics sections of rare real bookstores; we browse lots of “best of” lists and read lots of reviews. 

But we always save room for one self-indulgent, just-cuz-we-loved it book, like Follow My Leader and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. It's a joy to see modern kids respond to these books with the same wide-eyed wonder we “vintage” kids had. We’re so glad we get to introduce them to each other!

This spring we included Robert McCloskey's Homer Price in our workshop series, because we remembered and loved one single mouthwatering hilarious happy scene:  Homer’s doughnut machine that wouldn’t stop spewing out doughnuts. Now THAT’S an image no kid can forget, right?  Who doesn’t love the idea of endless doughnuts? It wasn’t the greatest reason to choose a great book, but hey, we’re the bosses of us. If only a few people sign up, we said, we’ll still have a wonderful time. More doughnuts for us.

But it turned out to be a huge hit, and we got to share it with almost a hundred happy, wide-eyed kids.

We had a lot of fun planning our "field trip through Homer Price," and came up with all sorts of straight-from-the-story ideas for sharing its teaching points hands-on ways. But while rereading this 1943 book, we realized we were now looking at it through a post-2020 lens, and new things were jumping out at us. For one thing, we could see that Robert McCloskey (who also wrote Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal) was an uncommonly thoughtful, forward-thinking author—far more than some might think at first glance. (We wrote more about that right here.) And that felt good.

And Homer Price gave us tons of opportunities to laugh at American ingenuity and be inspired by everyday heroes—like Homer himself. Our solution-oriented hero uses his wits to catch the bad guys, help a superhero out of a ditch, come up with an advertising campaign that saves a treasure, and protect Centerburg kids from a potential "pied piper"—by virtue of his having read so many great books, and learned their valuable lessons. Because Homer's interested in others and wants to help, he figures out how.

It's that easy to be a hero—what a great lesson for kids!

So if by chance you’re among those who don’t know this book yet, we (and our LitWitters) think you and your kids will love it too—and learn as well as laugh. 

If you've read it, please share YOUR thoughts—and if you haven't, come see what we did in our workshop! It's all on our free page of Creative Teaching Resources for Homer Price. We're pretty sure it'll inspire you to read it . . . and dash out for a donut run.