Meet the Malones

Lenora Weber

Lenora Mattingly Weber's deeply-loved Beany Malone series has been read by legions of schoolchildren over the years. It's popularity has flagged somewhat, with its somewhat dated prose and overly bucolic settings, but it has yet to go out of print. Image Cascade Publishing are the newest press to take up the Malone standard, having taken over the publishing of the venerable series in the late nineties.

In this first volume of fourteen that spanned over a quarter century, we do exactly what the title tells us-- meet the Malones, a Denver family during World War II whose mother died two years before the opening of the book. Martie Malone, the scion of the family, is a writer for the newspaper. The kids are all in various stages of school, save Elizabeth, a war bride. The book opens with Mary Fred, the second-eldest daughter, having just spent the money she was going to use to buy a dress for the spring formal on a horse, worrying about how she'd pay the balance of the horse's price and still manage to feed the animal. On the way home, she passes her brother Johnny, who was on his way to town to buy a new typewriter but got into a fender bender with a truck full of eggs. Beany, back at home, is contemplating redecorating her room. Tough problems, to be sure-- especially during the war years, when not much of anyone had ready cash.

It's escapism, pure and simple. The Denver inhabited by the Malones is a place where the most immediate crisis to be found is a neighbor's missing dog. The war affects the family, but indirectly-- uncle Mat sends home a few English children whose parents were concerned about bombings, for example-- but the coziness of the atmosphere and Weber's comforting prose assures the reader that there won't be so much as a scarped knee to be seen between the covers of this book. And if you're looking for escapism, it's pretty good stuff. Weber's characters are solid, if a bit two-dimensional (of the variety if two-dimensionality, of course, that comes from having never faced real adversity), and her situations are nostalgic versions of the things we all faced in our school years, whether they happened during a war or not. You'll find some things to like here.