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great-grandfather, a magician, having
cut her great-grandmother in half and
never put her back together. It’s an-
other story that Louisiana has grown
up with. Now, Granny says, “the curse
at last must be confronted.”
Walter Benjamin famously observed
that the wisest thing children can learn
from fairy tales is to meet the world
not with obedience but “with cunning
and with high spirits.” A character such
as Puss in Boots tells lies because he
and his master have to make their way
through an unjust world; the “is” of the
world is not the “ought” of the world,
and that is why the deceptions are re-
quired. So we might say that Louisiana
is the most cunning and high-spirited
of the three girls—she has no choice.
The morning of their departure from
Lister, Louisiana is devastated, angry,
and tired. She has been through this
sort of thing too many times before.
She stops speaking to Granny on the
drive north, but when they cross the
Florida–Georgia state line, Granny
pulls over. “Oh, my tooth, my tooth.
Oh, it is the curse of my father,” she
says. Her pain is so severe she can no
longer drive. Louisiana writes:
I sat there for a minute and thought
about my options, and there
weren’t many of them.
And that is how it came to pass
that I—Louisiana Elefante—slid
behind the wheel of the car and
cranked the engine and put the
blinker on and pulled out onto the
highway and went in search of a
dentist.Louisiana has long been attached to
Granny’s stories, including the one
about the Flying Elefantes. In Louisi-
ana’s Way Home, she starts to let these
stories go, isolating what few facts re-
main. Of her parents she writes:
They are dead, and I do not re-
member them at all. I have only
ever known Granny. She has been
my mother and my father. She has
taught me everything I know.Louisiana’s tale, as she tells it, is a
deliberate reimagining of Pi nocchio,
with Pinocchio here being a young girl
raised by a charismatic confabulator
whose stories make more sense as tan-
gled codes than direct truths. Through
writing, Louisiana tries to understand
why Granny has driven her away from
Lister, working out the balance of anger
and love she feels toward Granny, whose
delusions have had such control over
Louisiana’s own well- being and needs.
“Finding a dentist is not as easy as
you might imagine,” Louisiana says.
“Nothing is.” But Granny has taught
her how to gather information from
strangers—including by smiling with
“all of my teeth”—and she manages
to find one named Dr. Fox. Unlike the
Fox in Pi nocchio, the dentist turns out
to be a nice man. He does, however, ex-
tract Granny’s rotted teeth in an emer-
gency procedure. Louisiana evades the
unpayable bill by making up a nonexis-
tent grandfather named William Sun-
der who lives on Blue Fairy Lane.
Granny, now toothless, has lost one
of her greatest resources: her ability to
smooth-talk her way through transac-
tions with those who can provide what
she and Louisiana need. When she sends
Louisiana into a motel called the Good
Night, Sleep Tight later that day to try to
get a room without paying, she instructs
her, “Use your charm.” Louisiana has
charm, but she also has wonder, which
is often a source of her charm. She no-
tices a vending machine in the vestibule:It was stocked with the most amaz-
ing array of things. There were
toothbrushes with little tubes of
toothpaste attached to them, and
candy bars with caramel and nuts,
and also bags of peanuts, and rain
bonnets that were folded up into
neat little squares, and packages of
crackers with orange cheese in the
middle of them.
The vending machine was such
a miracle that as I stood and con-
templated it, I almost wondered if
I was dreaming.Her awe at the vending machine speaks
to her poverty, but also to her sensitivity
to unremarked-upon splendor—a gift
at least in part attributable to Granny.
When others are in the presence of
Louisiana and Granny, they sometimes
see the world in that way, too. One of
Raymie’s happiest moments in the first
book is the girls’ visit to Granny and
Louisiana’s house, where they eat tuna
fish together directly out of the can and
drink water out of paper cups that were
discarded. Louisiana explains:They’re supposed to have the an-
swer to the riddle on the bottom,
but they made a mistake and forgot
to put the answer there... and that’s
why we got thousands of the cups
for free. Because they don’t have
the answer. Isn’t that something?In Raymie Nightingale, the reader
experiences Louisiana’s near drowning
from Raymie’s perspective. In Louisi-
ana’s Way Home, we get Louisiana’s
version, which replaces the ghost of
Clara Wingtip with the comforting fig-
ure of the Blue Fairy:The Blue Fairy is very beautiful. I
don’t know if you know this or not.
She is very beautiful and very kind.
And when I was underwater and
almost drowning, the Blue Fairy
opened her arms to me and smiled.
Her blue hair was floating above
her head, and there was a light all
around her.
And then Raymie came and
saved me from drowning and the
Blue Fairy floated away. She went
in the opposite direction, deeper
into the pond. She looked ex-
tremely disappointed as she left.
I have never told anybody that
before—about the Blue Fairy ap-
pearing to me and how sad she
seemed that I was not going with
her. But I am writing it down now.
There is a great deal of power in
writing things down.Louisiana clearly knows her Pi noc-
chio. The Blue Fairy that she sees, and
disappoints, is, in the original Collodi
text, herself a ghostly child when Pin-
occhio first meets her:Seeing that it was useless to knock,
he began kicking the door, and beat-
ing it with his head. At that, a lovely
child opened the window. Her hair
was blue, and her face as white as
wax; her eyes were closed, and her
hands were crossed on her breast.Without moving her lips she said
in a very low voice that seemed to
come from another world, “There
is nobody in this house. They are
all dead.”Eventually Louisiana learns her true
origin story, which, like Pinocchio’s, is
not straightforward. Granny is not her
biological grandmother, and her parents
were not famous trapeze artists who
tragically drowned. In a letter, Granny
finally offers an explanation that seems
closer to the truth: she found Louisi-
ana as an abandoned infant, wrapped
in a floral blanket, alone on a pile of
cardboard behind the Louisiana Five-
and-Dime in New Orleans, where she
was working at the time. “You smiled
at me,” she writes. “I named you for
where you were found, and caring for
you has been the greatest joy of my life.”
Granny w r ites this letter to L ouisiana
before driving off from the motel to die
alone. Although her leaving echoes Lou-
isiana’s original abandonment, Granny
has equipped Louisiana with a set of sur-
vival skills, and does everything in her
power to convey her love: “I have loved
you with the whole of myself, Louisi ana.
You will always and forever be loved by
me.” In so doing, she sets Louisiana free.The third novel, Beverly, Right Here,
poses a distinct problem: its central
character is now fourteen, an age nei-
ther enchanted nor fully mature. What
use are fairy tales to someone who is
convinced she has outgrown them?
Beverly’s mother is often drunk and
angry; Beverly herself is guarded and
alert, quick to spot the lies of grown-
ups. She also has a gift for telling truths
that others would leave unsaid, as when
she says to Raymie, in the first book,
what no one else will acknowledge:
“People leave and they don’t come back.
Somebody has to tell you the truth.”
Beverly, Right Here begins with the
death of the dog Buddy, whom Beverly
adopted after the three girls rescued him
from the pound. After burying him in
her backyard in Lister, she thinks to her-
self, “Buddy is dead—my dog is dead....
No one can make me stay.” She hitches a
ride with her nineteen- year-old cousin,
Joe Travis, to a town called Tamaray
Beach, an hour or so down the highway.
During the drive Joe Travis offers her a
cigarette, which she declines. When she
won’t tell him what she’s planning, he
accuses her of being secretive and just
like her mother: “You always did think
that you was better than everybody else
on God’s green earth.... I don’t care
how many beauty contests your mom
won back in the day.” The truth is, Bev-
erly has no particular plan. But she isn’t
like her mother, nor is she taken in by
clichéd stories of sophistication.
Beverly applies for a job busing ta-
bles at the first business she sees—a
fish restaurant—telling the manager
that she’s sixteen. He knows she’s lying,
but he agrees to take her on; the fact
that he has three daughters of his own,
who live with their mother in Pennsyl-
vania, seems to be part of the reason.
“It’s a tragedy, having kids,” he tells
her. “Don’t let anybody tell you any
different.” The waitress is an older
girl named Freddie, who tells Beverly
that she needs to dream bigger: “I’m
going to be somebody.... You could be
somebody, too. You’ve got good, long
legs.... And your hair is nice. Let me
see your teeth.” Beverly bares her teethat Freddie, keeping her at bay in much
the same way she did with her cousin.
Though Beverly rejects the openness
to wonder that worked for Raymie and
Louisiana, she’s guided by snippets of
lyricism. Away from home, she thinks,
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds”—a
bit of poetry from school that stays
with her. At another point she notices
some text scratched into the glass of a
phone booth: “In a crooked little house
by a crooked little sea.” T hese nu rser y
rhyme–like words guide and comfort her
more than the phone call she makes to
her mother, whose response to hearing
that Beverly is okay is “Whoop-de-do.”
Beverly ends up rooming in a trailer
park with an old woman named Iola,
whose cat, Nod, takes an immediate
shine to her. She also becomes friends
with a gentle and bullied sixteen-year-
old named Elmer who works at the local
convenience store, Zoom City. He hands
out dimes to children of little means
who want to ride the mechanical horse
out front. Behind the counter, he reads
about art history. When Beverly first sees
him there, he’s reading a book that has an
image of wings on the cover: “The wings
were a bright, impossible, glorious blue.”
Beverly is not interested in ghosts or
fairies. But there is something about
this Italian Renaissance painting that
speaks to her:Beverly studied the blue wings on
the cover of the book. They be-
longed to an angel who was hover-
ing over a woman with her hands
on her cheeks. The woman didn’t
look all that happy.
But then, neither did the angel.When Elmer asks Beverly what she’s
looking for as she roams the aisles of
the store, the angel’s wings come to
mind: “That was what she was looking
for—that brilliant, impossible blue.”
The next day Beverly returns to Zoom
City and asks Elmer questions about the
painting—in particular about how that
blue is made. “It’s a gem,” he tells her as
she walks him to his bus stop after work.
“It’s lapis lazuli. They ground it up
and turned it into paint.” For Beverly,
saying the words “lapis lazuli” is “like
muttering a spell, an incantation”:
“‘Lapis lazuli!’ she shouted after the
bus. ‘Lapis lazuli!’ They were such
beautiful words. She couldn’t help it.
She loved them.”
The Florida-born writer Karen Rus-
sell once said to me of an irrational but
desirable plan—like the plan of writing
stories, say—that it’s like planting mints
and lug nuts and old pennies in a field
and then expecting a garden to grow.
Yet unlikely objects sown in the imag-
ination do occasionally bloom. DiCa-
millo’s prose often works by revealing
affinities between the grand and the in-
significant. For Beverly, the discovery of
the color of the angel’s wings—and the
words to name it—unlocks something.
She begins to pay attention not only to
what she doesn’t want but also to what
she does want. Back at the fish restau-
rant, she surveys her surroundings:Outside the open door, past the
seagull and the dumpsters and the
hotels, there was a small strip of
ocean visible. It was a bright, spar-
kling blue.
Not as bright as lapis lazuli.
But bright enough.Q