Children’s literature is full of plucky, good-hearted orphans looking for a home. In The Willoughbys, Lois Lowry gives us a set of plucky, good-hearted children looking to become orphans.
This spoof of the “deserving orphan” story has all the necessary plot elements: a baby delivered at a doorstep, a tragic accident, a grieving rich person, a critical letter unopened, and an assortment of unsavory characters. If you are only familiar with Lowry’s serious-minded works, such as The Giver and Number the Stars, both Newbery Award winners, this one will surprise you.
Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby can’t stand their four children, Tim, little Jane, and the twins, Barnaby A and Barnaby B. One evening, when the children beg them for a bedtime story, Mr. Willoughby grudgingly reads of the starving woodcutter and his wife in “Hansel and Gretel.”
“How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?” “I’ll tell you what, husband,” answered the woman. “Early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is thickest…. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.”
Mr. Willoughby sends the children to bed and announces to his wife he has come up with a plan to get rid of their children. “Oh goodness, do we have to walk them into a dark forest?” Mrs. Willoughby replies. “I don’t have the right shoes for that.”
When I described the Willoughby children as “good-hearted,” I wasn’t entirely accurate. They have inherited a certain amount of ruthlessness themselves. Having decided that they would prefer to be orphans like Huckleberry Finn or Anne of Green Gables, they drop a leaflet for The Reprehensible Travel Agency into their parents’ mail slot.
Their parents take the bait, leave the children at home with a nanny, and set off for canoeing among crocodiles and touring volcanoes by air with an inexperienced pilot. The nanny, a no-nonsense sort, bristles at being compared to Mary Poppins. “It almost gives me diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!” But she turns out to actually like the children.
To the children’s dismay, their parents send gleeful postcards telling of their escapes from crocodiles, plane crashes, and earthquakes. And the children discover that their parents have put the house up for sale, so they (and the nanny) are soon to be homeless.
The rest (I’m not going to get into the baby on the doorstep and the grieving rich guy) is a hilarious race to the finish, to see who will outlast whom.
At the end, Lowry includes a tongue-in-cheek glossary and a bibliography of classic “orphan” books to which references are made during the story. Since she sticks to the old-fashioned tales, Lowry does not mention the Baudelaire children of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. I mention them because fans of those books are almost certain to enjoy The Willoughbys.
This book will be on next year’s 4th and 5th grade Battle of the Books reading list.
Check the WRL catalog for The Willoughbys.
Blogging for a Good Book 
Leave a Reply