At vere loqui, Martin Cothran has taken a very interesting spin on what makes great children’s books and why.  His thesis is that good books help kids socialize themselves without having to learn everything through firsthand experience (and mistakes!).  These are his remarks about Penrod:

An Indiana version of Tom Sawyer, and at least as good. Penrod is a boy who is having trouble figuring out the rules of the adult world, and the adults are having trouble figuring out why Penrod can’t figure them out. Tarkington, one of the great and under appreciated American writers, penned this rumination on boyhood in the early 20th century, and produced one of the funniest books ever written. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, this is a book about a “bad” boy (really, an ignorant boy). And, like all such books, it helps your own “bad” boy at home see himself in the third person. He sees how silly he is by seeing how Tom and Huck and Penrod look to the outside observer.

I think he’s got a great point.  When my dad read Penrod to my brother and I, it was clear that he could find humor in childish troublemaking, so we even learned that my dad could be human, too.  And on our end, we could see that, while he could find Penrod’s shenanigans humorous, he wouldn’t be too pleased either.  So not only did we learn from Penrod, we learned from our dad, too.  Great times, and great memories.