Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath is a story about a curious little girl who ends up finding peace and resolve. The book was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2002 and is appropriate for children between the ages of 12 and 14. Primrose Squarp is an orphan whose parents supposedly perished at sea, and despite her overwhelming suspicions, nobody in Coal Harbor believes that she is right to be suspicious. The town doesn’t want to pay Miss Perfidy wages to baby-sit her anymore, so she is relocated to her Uncle Jack’s home. Neither Primrose nor Uncle Jack is happy about this, and she is disturbed by noises in his home at night. She enjoys a restaurant called The Girl on the Red Swing where one can find everything served on a waffle. She finds solace in Miss Bowzer, the manager of the restaurant, and later learns that her missing parents were located at Comox Hospital. Happy to have met the people that she did and had the adventures that she had, she is relieved to find her parents, but also grateful for the experience.
The experience while reading this book was a flight of the imagination. It was philosophical, unique, humorous, and heartwarming. I very much enjoyed Primrose Squarp and the characters that she met along her journey. I also thought that the ending of the book was very charming as Squarp told her readers how to make waffles and then added to eat them with butter and syrup, but if you are at her favorite restaurant, everything goes on waffles.
In this world, everyone has secrets and we long for certain questions to be answered. This little girl deserved one and refused to stop until she had it, and this is what makes Squarp’s character so admirable. I think that a lot of school-aged children could relate to this book. Being in the school system, we realize that many children have lost their parents and adopters are not always begging for them. They are often even mistreated. A lot of children will find peace in this story.
This is the first book that I have read by Polly Horvath, but she is the author of The Trolls, An Occasional Cow, The Happy Yellow Car, and When the Circus Came to Town. According to the book jacket for Everything on a Waffle, The Trolls is also a very adventurous story with entertaining characters. It seems that Hovarth’s books have a common theme; they are all adventurous in nature and feature characters on a quest for truth through unlikely, humorous tales.
From this book, I gathered that not all realistic fiction in children’s literature has to be plausible and that ridiculous elements, coupled with realistic ones, can make a grand story. With this in mind, the story absolutely would not have been the same without Miss Bowzer, her cleverness, and her waffles.
References
Horvath, P. (2001). Everything on a waffle. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
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