Beverly Cleary struggled as a young reader, finding the books offered to children to be boring, unrealistic portrayals of childhood and seeing reading lessons as rote, mundane exercises that did not inspire a love of reading. Once she began her writing career, Cleary resolved to infuse her works with an appreciation for books and literacy, and she created characters for whom books and reading are an essential part of their personality. Though Ramona describes her sister as the bookworm of the family, Ramona is also on a journey to cultivating a love of reading. When Ramona was a toddler, she demanded her parents and her sister read aloud to her. As a first grader, though she is not yet fluent enough to read longer books, Ramona is learning to explore words and the power they can have to inspire creativity and open new worlds of possibility and adventure.

True to her kinesthetic learning style, Ramona is bored by Mrs. Griggs’s banal language lessons, which relegate her to circling pictures and filling in blank lines. Ramona prefers to learn language actively by encountering words out in the wild, harnessing her love and marvel at the outer world to teach her how words sound and what they mean: “Best of all, Ramona was actually learning to read.