Ferris by Kate DiCamillo

"Every story is a love story. Every good story is a love story."

Ferris (real name Emma Phineas Wilkey) was born under the amusement park Ferris Wheel ten years ago. Her grandmother was there to witness the event and Ferris is sure she can remember the moment her grandmother, Charisse, caught her. 

I guess if you think about it every family is a little bit eccentric, but Ferris sure does have an interesting cast of characters in her life. 

Charisse, her grandmother, is a central figure in Ferris's life. They share a very tender bond. Charisse lives upstairs in the family home. Her son is Ferris's dad and her other son - Uncle Ted - has moved into the basement. One of the sweetest parts of this story comes near the end when we meet the owner of the hardware store Allen Buoy - he has secretly been in love with Charisse for decades. Charisse calls Ferris Emmaphineas. "Ferris figured she had spent more than half of her time on earth in Charisse's room - talking to her grandmother, listening to her, playing gin rummy with her, and reading to her from the Bible and also from a battered paperback copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass."

Dad is the quiet member of the family. He an architect by day and a reader of the encyclopedia in his spare time. He also loves to repeat a cryptic saying at every turn - "The dogs bark but the caravan passes by."  Ferris explains this by saying "you can bark about what you want or shout about it, but that the world doesn't care that much really; it just keeps on doing what it's doing."

Mum is pragmatic. She is a high school maths teacher. I love her life commentary: "I'm not hosting a dinner party, Charisse. ... If Ted wants to get out of bathrobe and come up the stairs and sit down at the table and sit down with us, he is perfectly welcome to do that. But did I extend him a gilded invitation? No, I did not."; "It's always something around here, itsn't it?"; "I do not want this to turn into some incident that we will read about in the paper the next morning as we sit in the smoldering ruins of our house."

Pinky, is her sister. She totally bounces to her own beat moving from one obsession to another. One day she wants to be famous and runs about in a black cloak with an imaginary sword, then she decides she needs to have her name on a wanted poster for being a bank robber, then she discovers Houdini and his famous escapes. Her real name is Eleanor Rose but NO ONE is allowed to use that name. The tooth incident will make you shudder.

"Boomer was the dog. He was part sheepdog and part German shepherd, and also, according to Ferris's father, part woolly mammoth."

"Aunt Shirley was blonde and pink. She looked like someone who had been spun out of sugar and placed on top of a celebratory cake."

Uncle Ted has a PhD in Philosophy, he is a sign painter, but he has left his job now he is working on a mural in the Wilkey basement. 

There are lots of music references in this book but the most important one is the piece Billy Jackson keeps playing - The Mysterious Barricades. Hear it here at a slower tempo. I also like the guitar version. I really wish I had taken the time to listen to this before reading this book - it sure does set an additional beautiful tone to the story as Billy Jackson sits in the Wakely house playing this tune in the background to all family happenings. And I had no idea Billy Jackson was such a piano virtuoso. 

Les Barricades Mystérieuses (The Mysterious Barricades) is a piece of music that François Couperin composed for harpsichord in 1717. 

Here are a set of questions to use with a group reading Ferris. Oddly these notes do not list all the wonderful Mielk words from the book. Here are a few: ludicrous; gilded, intimation, ignoble, bereft, insouciant (a new word for me meaning unconcerned or indifferent), and unrepentant.

There is a poem on page 165 - I wonder if it is by Kate DiCamillo or some famous poet? Perhaps it is inspired by Walt Whitman?

I started to read Ferris when I was away for a weekend wedding event but the hustle and bustle of that distracted me. When I arrived home, I started Ferris all over again and read the whole book in one delicious afternoon. I did plan to talk about Ferris here on my blog straight away but then I decided - no - I needed to read it all over again. I so rarely re-read books but with Kate DiCamillo I make an important exception. I have read Because of Winn Dixie three times, The Tale of Despereaux twice, The Tiger Rising twice and The Magician's Elephant twice. 

Use the label Kate DiCamillo from this post to find the books that I have talked about on this blog. 

I hope someone somewhere has based their PhD on the writing of Kate DiCamillo. Here are a few of my observations:

• Kate DiCamillo writes with a unique voice and this lingers with the reader long after the book is finished. 
• Kate DiCamillo creates quirky, individual characters that we care very deeply about. Boomer is described as having “a gentle soul”; Charisse is described as a romantic; Ferris’s mom is described as practical and pragmatic; -Pinky is described as monomaniacal; -Ferris’s dad is described as mild-mannered; and Shirley is described as formidable.
• Her writing is always emotional but she adds tiny moments of humour - I actually laughed out loud twice in this book on the third reading.
• No words are wasted. Readers are easily able to fill in complex back stories for her characters.
• Words are important - they are more than tools to tell a story. In this book there are 'big' words invested with enormous meaning and emotion. I mentioned some in this post. They work as a scaffold to help readers. Mrs Meilk, bless her, has inspired Ferris and her friend Billy Jackson to do more than learn new words - they embrace them.
• Every book by Kate DiCamillo is unique and yet there are links between them. Ferris brings her community together for example, just as we saw with our favourite little girl Opal in Because of Winn Dixie. And of course, again we have a very special dog in Ferris - his name is Boomer.

I just re-read Betsy Bird's review of Raymie Nightingale and, to me, so many of her wise words also apply to Ferris. 

• I like the wordplay, the characters, and the setting. I like what the book has to say about friendship and being honest with yourself and others. ... 
• And in a book like this, you find that the characters are what stay with you the longest.
• DiCamillo excels in the most peculiar of details.
• Sadness is important to DiCamillo. As an author, she’s best able to draw out her characters and their wants if there’s something lost inside of them that needs to be found.

I will leave it to your own reading to discover the sadness in this book Ferris. Besty also mentions peculiar details here are a couple I enjoyed in Ferris:

• "Twilla had sat down and picked up a copy of Good Housekeeping that had a picture of a Jell-O mold on the cover."
• "Ferris gave her hand to Billy Jackson ... Billy's hand was sweating. His glasses were attached to his head with a strap, and Ferris knew almost immediately, from that very first moment, that she didn't want to ever lose hold of Billy Jackson."
• Ferris describes Big Billy's Steakhouse - "Ferris walked across the red carpet (everything in the steakhouse was red: the glass candle holders and the Naugahyde* booths and the tablecloths, even the window were made of a pebbled red glass)."   * a vinyl covering used for furniture.
• Mrs Mielk wears oversized fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. 

I would add another theme in Ferris to the list above - light - sunlight and candlelight and the colour yellow. Can I also say this is NOT a ghost story but it does contain a ghost - this will make sense when you read Ferris. Add this book to your library and home collection TODAY. Here is the US cover:

Here are some reviews with more plot details:

• Kirkus Star review
• School Library Journal - Betsy Bird - she talks about the autobiographical aspects of Ferris and Kate DiCamillo - and refers to this New Yorker interview. (Note this does refer to confronting domestic violence). "One of the great things about being able to tell stories is that I can find a way to make sense out of what happened to me as a kid. And maybe help another kid feel safe and less alone." I talk about this in my post here. 
• The Book Muse (Australian)
• A Book and a Hug

Publisher blurb Walker Books Australia: It’s the summer before fifth grade, and for Ferris Wilkey, it is a summer of sheer pandemonium. Her little sister, Pinky, has vowed to become an outlaw. Uncle Ted has left Aunt Shirley and, to Ferris’s mother’s chagrin, is holed up in the Wilkey basement to paint a history of the world. And Charisse, Ferris’s grandmother, has started seeing a ghost in the doorway to her room – which seems like an alarming omen given that she is feeling unwell. But the ghost is not there to usher Charisse to the Great Beyond. Rather, she has other plans – wild, impractical, illuminating plans. How can Ferris satisfy a spectre with Pinky terrorizing the town, Uncle Ted sending Ferris to spy on her aunt, and her father battling an invasion of raccoons?