I really want a copy of “the other book about Connie Ives’s alley, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode.” That desire is a good sign that The Alley was a good book. I actually had no idea that Eleanor Estes had written anything other than The Moffats and its companion books about the same family and of course, The Hundred Dresses, a story that is and will always be a classic story about compassion and repentance. However, as I look I see that Estes wrote several other books, including The Alley.

Connie lives in Brooklyn in a house that along with twenty-seven other similar houses backs upon an alley, not an ugly alley, but one that provides a place for the children of the Alley to play and imagine and swing and read and learn to follow rules and grow.

“In the Alley there was more space than you might think to ride bikes in, and at the bottom end of the ——–I was the Circle, excellent for turning around in and excellent for games.

Every yard had flowers. Now it was May, and the flowers were tulips, irises, lilacs.

The Alley–the little houses on the Alley–was an oasis in a great city of good people and of dangerous people. In this city, there were some burglars. ‘But then, that is life,’ thought Connie. ‘In the old days they had Indians, wild animals, pirates, and dragons. They had witches. Now–burglars. You have to take the bad along with the good.’ But Connie never thought much of the burglars there might be outside the Alley. She thought mainly of life inside the Alley, in the beautiful, fragrant Alley. Her life was made up mainly of school and Alley.”

p. 13

The Alley was a book every bit as good as The Moffats or The Penderwicks or Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays. Ten year old Connie is an only child, but she has plenty of substitute brothers and sisters in the Alley: her best friend Billy Maloon, Hugsy Goode, Connie’s next-best friend, Katy Star, the rule-maker of the Alley, June Arp, the girl next door, and the thirty or so other children who live along the Alley. And Connie and Billy and the rest have plenty to do: in addition to swinging on Connie’s swing set, they teach piano lessons, go to school, play Meece and other games, and investigate a burglary during the months of May and early June, with is all that the story covers. It seems, through the eyes of a ten year old like a much longer time, and yet the days are full of fun and quirky antics and adventures.

“Connie did not mind the long days that began empty and ended up full. Oh, the wonderful and long days of summer! Just to hold a whole day in your hand and have it and think that it was empty to begin with but that each moment could, would, contain so much.”

p. 280

Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, The Alley is, according to the Chicago Tribune quote on the front cover, “a story not to be missed.” I agree.