Harriet The Spy Essay

“Harriet the Spy” was written by Louise Fitzhugh and was originally published in 1964. The author liked to focus on contemporary social issues when writing her books. She did focus on social issues within this book as well such as bullying. The intended audience for this book is children in grades 3 to 7. “Harriet won no awards, with the possible exception of the Sequoyah Book Award and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award in 1964”(Bird). The author went on to write two sequels to the book titled The Long Secret and Sport. Later on in 1996 Harriet the Spy was made into a film with the same name created by Nickelodeon. In 2004 Mainframe Entertainment produced a TV series of Harriet the Spy. The show consisted of twenty two half hour programs. Finally, in 2010 Disney Channel aired an adaptation of the book titled Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars. To be honest my opinion of Harriet M. Welsh was a bit harsh. I was introduced to a child that got away with entirely too many things such as attitude, behavior issues, and hurting people physically as well as mentally. Harriet parents knew about many of the incidents that occurred throughout the book, but lacked proper parenting skills. They were unable to talk with Harriet about her behavior and explain why what she was doing to other and saying to others

Many people in my opinion would identify with the character. My only problem with this story is that in the end the character still continued to write in her notebook hateful comments about people. She seemed remorseful for the items written in the book once people saw them and began treating her as an outcast, yet when she could have apologized she never did. She never saw a problem with what she did. Then she created a lie to get her friends back, the remorse went away and she stayed the same. There was no growth from the character whatsoever and that bothered