This book is about a little girl who tries to hide her woolen underwear from the other girls at dance school. She makes friends with another girl and they share adventures through out the book and their friendship.

This book was written about 20 years earlier than most of the Ramona books, and it shows. Ellen's mother makes all her clothes for her and worries about her clean floor. (I'm not even sure I *have* a clean floor - or, some days, a floor at all!) The girls wear only dresses to school (and most everyplace else). Otis has a full cowboy outfit (with spurs) and we're told that MOST of the children in the school have a cowboy hat, or even a neckerchief. (When's the last time you saw that sort of cowboy mania? Oh right - back in the 50s, when this was published.) And let's not forget the infamous woolen undies. If it was old-fashioned back in the 50s, and this was the first I'd ever heard of it in the 90s, just think how foreign it must seem to today's third-graders! (And let's put a little note for the names. When is the last time you saw a class full of Ellens and Austines, Otises and Lindas? Ramona is a name that passes the test of time. Otis... not so much.)

But you know what? It doesn't matter. The kids still seem as real as when they were written. They bake brownies, they worry about their teacher not liking them, and they get into a whopper of a fight when Ellen slaps her friend. Everything that happens has a ring of truth to it, even if the details aren't quite like they would be today. ( )

Patch liked the book a lot, partly because some of it was about dancing. He was also interested in whether the book had any morals. We decided that the morals were: Don't hesitate to be the first to apologize, and don't jump to conclusions. ( )

I adored this book as a kid, and I'm very pleased to report that I still adore it now. I find the Ellen character to be a bit more realistic that Cleary's other female lead characters somehow. Maybe I just identify with her more. I wish there were more books about her.

She has that whole slightly neurotic awkwardness about her that I think I identified with most. The thing that stuck with me most as a kid, of course, was the woolen underwear Ellen's mother forces her to wear during the cold weather months, because I was the only kid in my class who was forced to wear them, too. (And this was in the early 90s!) Some aspects of this book are fairly dated, but the kids are all so convincingly written that this book feels pretty timeless to me. ( )

Ellen needs a best friend and is in luck when Augustine moves to town from California in woolen underwear! Now the girls share a secret and a bond. I've loved this juvenile fiction tale of elementary very-best-girlfriends ever since I was quite young and higher recommend it for children ages 4 through 10. Ellen search for the beet, her trials with Otis, the naughty boy who teases her unmercifully - I dare say I can still recall almost every detail of this splendid story. Mmm......good. ( )