Line #5 Fridge/RamonaQuimby


1	!FridgeBrilliance
2	* Strange behaviors by older characters start to make more sense when you grow up:
3	** In ''Ramona the Pest'', Miss Binney gets uncharacteristically angry when Howie asks if her mother is coming to take her home when school is over. Being a young and inexperienced teacher, this was probably a sensitive subject for her. Her coworkers may have even made jokes about the subject.
4	** In ''Ramona Quimby, Age 8'', the whole family is moody in the chapter "Rainy Sunday" until they go out to dinner, but apart from Beezus being a BrattyTeenageDaughter because she can't go to a slumber party, Mrs. Quimby is the most short-tempered of them all. This is obviously in part from dealing with Beezus's tantrum, but it makes even more sense in light of the following book, ''Ramona Forever''. ''...Age 8'' ends in November, while ''...Forever'' ends with the birth of baby Roberta the following July: ergo, Mrs. Quimby is already pregnant during "Rainy Sunday," so her snappishness is probably slightly hormonal.
5	** In ''Ramona Forever'', Ramona is surprised that Beezus is so willing to babysit her after school instead of going to rich and popular Pamela's house. Beezus later explains that she's not speaking to Pamela because she was always asking when Mr. Quimby is going to get a "real" job. Beezus was probably looking for an excuse to get out of seeing Pamela without having to tell the truth.
6	** In ''Ramona Forever'', Ramona assumes that her aunt's wedding isn't going to happen when she snaps at her fiancé at the rehearsal party for forgetting to buy flowers for the church, and they get into a fight. Aunt Bea was probably under a huge amount of stress: She was finishing teaching elementary school and writing progress reports, planning a wedding, preparing to move to Alaska, selling her car, etc... All of that finally got to her and she lost it at something fairly minor. Once she got that out, she and Hobart were able to make up pretty easily. It's just too bad it happened in front of their families.
7	* Hobart has a beat-up van despite being quite affluent due to working in the oil industry. Why doesn't he drive a fancy sports car? He probably has some kind of emotional attachment to the car - maybe it was the first car he bought with his own money.
8	* In "Ramona Quimby, Age 8", Ramona throwing up is described as her stomach going into reverse. Earlier on in the same chapter, the parents were trying unsuccessfully to get the car to go into reverse, and since the books are written from Ramona's perspective, this description was probably used because that incident was still fresh in her mind.
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10	!FridgeHorror:
11	* An ongoing behavioral tic of the Quimbys' cat is his refusal to eat cheap cat food. In ''Ramona Forever'', he falls over and dies, supposedly of old age, but the gravestone Ramona makes for him says he was only 10 years old, which isn't that old for a cat (house cats can live to be 12-18 with proper care). Did the Quimbys inadvertently starve their cat to death?
12	** One has to wonder as to why and how Picky-Picky got to be the way he is. If he wasn't starved, then he might have gotten sick from his unusual eating habits.
13	** It's unlikely that Picky-Picky literally starved to death; first of all, there would have been noticeable signs that any reasonably attentive pet owner would have picked up on (the most obvious being that the cat would have been extremely thin and barely able to move), but also, animals are also just not wired to let themselves starve if they have a choice, so no matter how much Picky-Picky hated the food, his base instincts would eventually drive him to eat it rather than go without food completely (which eventually happens in ''Ramona and Her Father''). However, his dislike of the cheap food could have masked the symptoms of some kind of illness, since in many cases, one of the first things -- sometimes even the ''only'' thing -- that will alert owners to a problem is that the cat is losing its appetite, but if Picky-Picky was already indifferent towards his food, there wouldn't be a notable change to alert the Quimbys that something was wrong. (Also, the age number is iffy because he was also 10 in a book that takes place two years earlier, so probably don't put too much stock in that exact number.)
14	* In ''Ramona Quimby, Age 8'', Ramona gets stomach flu. However, stomach flu is very contagious and has an incubation period. Beezus and the parents got off lucky, but what about the other students? Or Mrs. Larson, who takes care of her in the office? Or the taxi driver (perhaps that's why he was described as looking "doubtful"; he was afraid of catching it from Ramona)? Did Ramona's throwing up in class ''cause'' any of the kids who sat near her to get sick too over the next few days?

Context Fridge / RamonaQuimby