By Beverly Cleary
A lonely boy writes to his favorite author for a school assignment, the author writes back with hard questions, and the answers slowly turn into a diary about waiting for a father who doesn't call.
Leigh Botts writes to the author Boyd Henshaw because his class has to write to an author. Henshaw writes back, which Leigh doesn't expect, and then he does something better than being polite: he mails back ten questions and tells Leigh to answer them. Leigh does, grumbling the whole way, and somewhere in the answering he starts telling a stranger things he's told nobody. His parents are divorced. He and his mom live in a little house tucked behind somebody else's; she works catering jobs and is training to be a nurse. His dad drives a refrigerated truck across the country with Leigh's dog Bandit up in the cab, and he doesn't call when he says he will. Somebody raids Leigh's lunch every single day, so Leigh builds an alarm to catch them. Then Bandit disappears at a truck stop. Henshaw suggests Leigh keep a diary, and the rest of the book is those letters and that diary, in Leigh's own plain voice, slowly getting better at saying what's true.
Cleary writes Leigh in the shortest sentences she can, and what's underneath shows through anyway. The book is built from letters and diary entries, so it reads in two-minute pieces, and 133 pages of that goes down easily for a child who stalls on thick books. The lunch thief is what keeps the pages turning: it's a real little mystery, with a homemade alarm and a suspect. Under it is the phone that doesn't ring. Leigh never says he's lonely, he just keeps mentioning that his dad promised to call, and a child reading it can arrive at the rest for themselves. I'd hand this to a child who says almost nothing about their own life, because it works quietly and never asks them to talk. It won the Newbery in 1984.