Jezebel
fine lines
Are You In The House Alone?: One Out of Four, Maybe More
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer/reviewer/blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads Richard Peck's 1976 novel 'Are You In The House Alone?', the story of a teen named Gail Osbourne and her Very UnSpecial Rape.
I am 34. I say this not because you asked — although I think some of you have asked, actually — but because it's key to understanding why through the babysitting days of my youth, I was incapable of getting through the night without being incapacitated by the thought that an attacker with a hyper-attuned grasp on my every move was waiting in the bushes for the minute I got the drumstick-shaped chicken nuggets scraped off the tray. Because for the entire stretch of my girlhood, they were raping everyone! First Kimberly was locked up by that old man and molested while Arnold banged on the door. Then Natalie had some bus-station incident with Tootie banging helplessly on the door. Irene Cara had to show her breasts to the pervy guy in Fame — even a girl in the Fame spinoff TV series got raped.More »
