“And that is why I’m going to sabotage this one.” There’s more behind Beverly’s anger than she’s willing to admit, and Raymie soon learns that Beverly’s father lives in New York and that Beverly once tried to find him, getting only as far as the Georgia border. The third baton student is the gum-snapping, knife-wielding Beverly Tapinski, who plans to enter the Little Miss Florida Central Tire contest with no aim of actually winning it: “My mother has entered me into every Little Miss contest there ever was, and I’m tired of it,” Beverly says. But Raymie suspects that things aren’t quite as rosy for Archie as the trusting and innocent Louisiana believes.
Louisiana needs the prize money to rescue her cat, Archie, from the Very Friendly Animal Shelter, where “they will feed Archie three times a day and scratch him behind the ears exactly the way he likes,” according to her eccentric grandmother. At the first lesson she meets Louisiana Elefante, a frail girl with “swampy lungs” who is also determined to win the contest. Raymie decides to learn baton-twirling for the talent portion of the contest.
She will win the 1975 Little Miss Florida Central Tire contest, and when her father sees the news stories about her triumph, he will leave the dental hygienist he has run off with and come back to his newly famous daughter. In Kate DiCamillo’s newest middle-grade novel, Ramie Nightingale, ten-year-old Raymie Clarke has cooked up a plan to convince her father to return home.
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