The Whipping Boy
by Sid Fleischman
Summary
Prince Horace, known to everyone as Prince Brat, is too well protected by his rank to ever be punished directly, so the palace keeps an orphan named Jemmy on hand to take beatings in his place. When the bored, restless prince decides to run away one night, he drags Jemmy along as an unwilling servant, and the two boys are almost immediately captured by a pair of highwaymen, Hold Your Nose Billy and Cutwater, who plan to ransom the prince back to the crown. Jemmy convinces the outlaws that he is actually the prince and Horace the servant, buying the real prince some cover, though Horace, misunderstanding what Jemmy is doing, briefly betrays him before the two manage to escape together.
On the road the boys meet Betsy, a girl searching for her runaway dancing bear Petunia, and a potato seller named Captain Nips, and at a country fair they overhear ordinary people saying plainly that the prince will make a poor king, a comment that stings Horace more than anything Jemmy could have told him directly. Learning that a reward has been posted for the kidnapped prince's whipping boy rather than for the prince himself, the boys turn the highwaymen's own greed against them, luring Billy and Cutwater into a rat infested sewer to make their final escape. Back at the palace, Horace tells the truth about what happened, Jemmy is pardoned, and the two boys, who started the story as master and whipping post, end it as genuine friends living under the same roof.
Fleischman writes with the timing of a professional entertainer, brisk chapters, broad comic set pieces, real danger kept at a manageable distance, and the whole book reads fast enough for a reluctant reader to finish in an afternoon without losing any of its wit.
Historical Context & Significance
The Whipping Boy won the 1987 Newbery Medal. That year's honor books were Marion Dane Bauer's On My Honor, Patricia Lauber's Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens, and Cynthia Rylant's A Fine White Dust. Greenwillow published the eighty nine page novel in April 1986, illustrated by Peter Sis; Fleischman, a former professional magician and screenwriter, won the medal for this short book after decades of writing for children.
A 1994 Disney Channel television film, retitled Prince Brat and the Whipping Boy and directed by Syd Macartney, adapted the story with George C. Scott and Vincent Schiavelli in the cast; Fleischman wrote the teleplay himself, and the film won a CableACE Award that year. Two years after this medal, Fleischman's son Paul Fleischman won the Newbery Medal of his own for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, making the Fleischmans the only parent and child to both win the award.