HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh (1964)

Yearling/Random House; 300 pages; comedy/drama; ages 8-12; ISBN: 978-0-440-41679-1.

Harriet M. Welsch wants to be a writer when she grows up, but she also fancies herself a spy. She writes down observations in a notebook about everyone she sees in her New York City neighborhood, but she also writes about her classmates and friends. The problem is, her "observations" are really judgments, e.g., "If Marion Hawthorne doesn't watch out she's going to grow up into a lady Hitler." When her notebook is discovered one day at recess, all heck breaks loose: her classmates form a Spy Catcher Club to get their revenge on Harriet via spitballs, spilled ink, etc., and she in return plots her own counter-retaliation. Luckily, her former nanny, Ole Golly, has some good advice on how Harriet can reverse her status as a scorned outcast.

When Harriet the Spy was published in 1964, its title character was seen as something entirely new in children's literature: a protagonist who isn't always likable, especially when she's planning revenge on classmates and friends that she's already hurt with her spy observations. ("Laura Peters: her hair," Harriet writes on her revenge list. "Cut it off. Or make a bald spot.") Fitzhugh exposes the anger that often lies just beneath the surface of school-age friendships, paving the way for writers like Judy Blume and her 1974 novel about fifth-grade "mean girls," Blubber.

For further reading, check out Fitzhugh's sequel of sorts, The Long Secret (1965), and Sport (1979), a spin-off about Harriet's titular friend that was published after Fitzhugh's death from a brain aneurysm in 1974 at the age of 46. There's also a 1996 film version of Harriet the Spy, which, like other tween movies aimed at girls, failed to generate much business at the box office.