How could a dream become a disaster?  Background:  Not to be confused with the similar-looking Sweet Dreams, First Love or Caprice paperback romances of the 1980s, Scholastic’s Wildfire tends to have a better quality of writing (Caroline Cooney and Ann M. Martin are a few of the authors who launched their careers with the imprint) and wackier covers than the competition. So, I’ve had this one sitting around for a while, dating back to before the founding of this site, when I was posting YA romance covers on my personal Facebook page for the amusement of fr ..read more

Was Aunt Mary Rose really a hero? Or has Mary Rose been living up to a lie? Background: Marilyn Sachs is best known for a number of interconnected middle-reader books set in a pre-Robert Moses South Bronx in the early 1940s. While in the past I have described her books as “weird and violent,” recounting an unsentimental past which takes a much more casual attitude towards physical violence and parental neglect, in this one Sachs deals with what turns out to be generational trauma and subjective truths in a way that is extremely sophisticated for its target audience. The Plot: More than thir ..read more

“MY MOTHER SUSPECTS I AM SLIGHTLY UNNATURAL.” We noted the death of YA giant Marijane Meaker, best known as M.E. Kerr, at the end of  last year: as one of the writers at Harper & Row under legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, she was an important part of the changing landscape of YA fiction in the late 1960s and 1970s. Like her colleagues Louise Fitzhugh, Mary Rodgers, Paul Zindel and John Donovan, she pushed the envelope in depicting “topical issues” including terrible parents, alienation from peers and questions of sexuality. Kerr stands out for a highly developed sense of whimsy ..read more

“I want a puppy for Christmas so badly. I’ll die if I don’t get one.”  I’ve had a few requests for The Fabulous Five series, Betsy Hayne’s spin-off from the Taffy Sinclair books, the first of which was reviewed here in 2016. Reviewer and readers alike recalled that the book, about a group of 5th graders who found a club to harass an early-developing classmate, as being strange and unsettling even for the 1970s. Although the girls seem to settle into an uneasy truce with Taffy by the end (I have not read any of half-dozen subsequent books, so how long does that last?) they fail to suffe ..read more

If her terrible injuries were to be tended, it was up to strangers – people like Penny – to do what must be done… Continuing our annual fall retrospective of Whitman girls’ series books with the 5th volume in the series by Jean Kirby, AKA Jinny McDonnell AKA Virginia Bleecher McDonnell. Background: I’ve noted before the reasons for the enduring popularity of Nursing as profession for YA heroines, so it’s no surprise that in the mid-1960s Whitman would take a pass at the genre. To their credit, they came up with a rather ingenious marketing concept: three young-adult daug ..read more

“He can’t do that!” Robin exclaimed. “I’m no lawyer, Mr. Lodato, but this is the United States of America and no one can take anyone’s child away from him like that!” Background: Usually, fall means a look at the “girls’ series” published by Whitman in the 1940s through the 1970s: those thick, cellophane-clad hardcovers featuring teen girls sleuthing around Westchester County or California’s Bay Area. You can tell that after 10 years of this, I have really started scraping the bottom of the Whitman barrel around here, having run through all of the Ginnies, Donn ..read more

Don’t miss television’s most imaginative show… If it’s summer, it must be time for watching reruns on TV and checking out novelizations of movies and TV shows out of the local library! (What? Isn’t this everyone?) A few summers back we took a look at one of Rod Serling’s anthologies of “Twilight Zone” stories, so this year I present another scintillating selection of Serling short stories…* *(You have to read this aloud in Serling’s voice to get the full effect) Background: After The Twilight Zone was finally cancelled in 1965 (ratings, budget overruns and creative clashes with CBS had made ..read more

How could nature have produced such virile perfection? Background: I am on the record about how I’ve turned around my opinion on Silhouette’s First Love romances (“AMERICA’S publisher of Contemporary Romance”), at least when it comes to Elaine Harper’s terminally loopy Blossom Valley adventures, especially when they involve tenuous connections to major holidays and constant bird-based peril. First Love published 236 titles between 1981 and 1987, so this one originally appeared very early in the run, although I have a reissued edition with “A Blossom Valley Book” on the cover and the “Specia ..read more

“A person never gets over high school, Judy.” I’ve written before about my general impression of YA fiction moving from topical issues based on shock value in the 1970s (Drugs! Cults! Satan!) and into more internal crises of the characters in the 1980s; Fat Jack, published in 1980 really strikes me as a transitional piece between these two eras. It sets up a few sensational topics, a potential scandal and a teenage betrayal, but then is ultimately about adults maybe or maybe not regretting the choices they made. The Plot: Opening in the present day of 1980, thirtysomething Judy Goldstein ca ..read more

There were times she wished she’d never come to America… Background: Scholastic’s Sunfire series is a cautionary tale about judging a YA Romance by its cover. Lurking behind the overheated cover art and melodramatic taglines are some of the best stories and most interesting heroines of the genre. Sort of a historical counterpart to Scholastic’s Wildfire Romances, the series was authored by a handful of Scholastic regulars, such as Vivian Schurfranz and Willo Davis Roberts, and are formulaic, but reliably consistent in quality. Each volume features a feisty 14-to-17 ..read more