(When I began this essay, I realized I had a few things to say about boys' books and girls' books and how much I've had to talk about them AGAINST MY WILL, but I went on for 19 hours and decided to spare everyone who just wanted some turtle in their soup, many thanks. To read the official preface to the piece, click here.)

For a young reader, I found a surprising number of my books on airport and train station carousels. (See below for more on my status as a world traveler of note.) For this reason, I was introduced to the wondrous Roald Dahl not through the delightful Danny, Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, or, of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but by the truly demented Tales of the Unexpected and Switch Bitch. (Leave it to me to lead with leprosy.)

That's why when I espied Henry Sugar and Six More on the top shelf of the children's section — still can't decide if it belongs there — I spent my hard-earned budget on the hardcover although it cut out a good 5 paperback purchases. A) It was worth it. B) Henry Sugar is an odd duck of a book, and no two ways about it — the kind of hodgepodge collection you might acquire if you simply asked an author to turn whatever currently sat on the desk and one or two old published favorites from years past, then hurriedly asked for an essay "On Writing" to round out the page count. (For all I know, this is exactly what happened.)

It begins with the spooky and brief story of a boy who rescues a turtle from a terrible death, moves on to a delightful tale of a speeder and a pickpocket, shifts to a story of a trove of Roman silver uncovered in an English field, moves to "The Swan," one of the most terrifying stories about bullying ever written, segues into the fantastical title story about an Englishman who learns to see without his eyes, then takes a break for Dahl to talk about how he became a writer (he invented the word "Gremlin" and hung out with FDR!) before presenting the first thing he's ever published-an account being shot down over North Africa during WWII.

But for all that the collection could seem scattershot, it is not-because it is held firmly together by Dahl's enduring theme: The terrible power of the thick-headed bully, and the transcendence of knowledge and kindness in the face of meaningless cruelty.

Common to horror writers is this pitched battle of the good against the innocent, the moment of quivering uncertainty when we don't know yet whether something terrible is going to happen and won't be able to stand it either way. But what's particular to Dahl, and what I'd forgotten, is how much he associates evil with eating. Because, whether it's to chop up a turtle alive during Waterloo for a dinner course of soup, kill and hack apart a swan for play, or simply greedily hoard silver a stash of wondrous silver, evil in Dahl is associated with overfeeding, and if you need to know who the bullies are, look for close-set, glittering eyes; fleshy lips and a wet, open mouth; meaty arms and thighs; nuts stuck in teeth, or simply the overly oiled who seek only to pamper and increase their flesh.

A Freudian might point out-and might manage to actually be right-that Dahl's linking of evil bullies to food might easily be traced back to the days when he could be caned for leaving a burnt spot on a slice of bread. And in each story there is that horrible moment of non-control and terror when the turtle caught; when the swan is actually shot; the siren goes off; the yogi dies; the silver stolen outright.

But Dahl, for all that horror, is an absurd optimist, who always allows the good to prevail. (My personal favorite revenge on the greedy comes from his story "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which – spoiler – a woman kills her husband with a large frozen lamb, then feeds it to the policemen investigating the crime.) Without exception, the persecuted simply swim, fly, drive, or otherwise slip the grasp of the cruel world. Even Henry Sugar, who's only held back by his own greedy proclivities, winds up a globe-hopper creating homes for the fellow homeless orphans.

Each reader will forever keep the image that stays with her of how they've escaped the grasp of the gobblers of life. (Mine is always Peter from "The Swan" not flying away, but moving his head back and forth to gently make enough of a depression in the train tracks to not be killed when it passes over him. But what Henry Sugar reminds us is that although the world is ruled by the senses, there is more shoot or be shot, cane or be caned, eat or be eaten. While the greedy try to eat it all up, the good see right through them.

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Hello pretties! Very brief Plotfinder this week from a friend who IS DESPERATE to know. The only detail she remembers is that a black girl is told to put butter in her hair to calm it, and, lacking butter, uses ghee. Takers? I remember using butter as lotion which makes your hands smell rancid (Flowers, yes?) but am clueless on this one.

Answer in comments below or send to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Winner gets FREE COPY.

Also have to relate brief story of what happened to me this morning, JUST BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I live in Jersey City and travel out of Newark Penn station 900 times a month to various places, supporting Amtrak as is my way. (I love trains.) The other day I was in Hudson Booksellers and started chatting with the clerk, and, since it was almost exactly the pub date of my book, told her all about it, and also that I would bring her a card and a copy the next week when I returned. So TODAY, I go in, w/card, and it turned out SHE'D ALREADY ORDERED IT AND THERE IT WAS ON THE SHELVES!



Since I discovered Roald Dahl en route (and contributor Jennifer Weiner, for what that's worth) I urge you — if you are in a place of transit and see a bookseller and you feel like it, tell them about this book! They seem like they'll order pretty much anything.

xoox
L

A note before we begin: A Summer to Die was not my Death book. My Death books (I had several; bear with me) were, excepting the pre-digested A Taste of Blackberries, Just Like Always (cancer ward, snotty blond, not to be confused with Just Like Sisters), Beat the Turtle Drum (horses, tree climbing, snotty sister), Bridge to Terabithia (running, bossy BFF, creek-swinging), and Jacob Have I Loved, in which the snotty sister, Caroline, doesn't actually die, though the dark-haired Louise wishes she would, often.

A Summer to Die is the story of two sisters: Meg; circumspect, awkward, and artistic; and Molly, confident and blonde, going so far as to make the cheerleading team (to the consternation of their English professor father). Which brings us to an important point about Death books: while survivalist narratives confine themselves to the nature of suffering tout seul, for someone to die in YA, you have to have two. Preferably a blonde- and brown-haired two, one lovely, haughty, and impatient with the other's caution; the other mousy, observant, and impatient with the other's confidence. (It occurs to me that I can just go ahead and tack on My Darling, My Hamburger here, as the important point is not for the blonde to die but for the blonde to suffer.)

Ah, yes! Spoiler alert! The blonde always dies. What we cannot achieve in life, we can in print. (Though in so doing the author often seems to forget that in killing off the casually superior compatriot, she propels her to an angelic realm wherein her beauty, once a terrestrial torment, is now not only also beatific but forever free of the ravages of age.)

Anyway. Meg and Molly (Meg is slightly younger) are recently removed to a lovely, rambling home in the country in order for their professor father to finish a book in peace. There, before tragedy strikes, Molly runs among the flowers, Meg masters photography, their mother quilts, their father writes, and Meg and Molly befriend Will, a kindly old widower next door, as well as his hippie tenants, Maria and Ben. In this temporary Eden, Meg putters in a darkroom with Will, walks in the snow, dances with her father and mother along to the radio, and, eventually, photographs the live birth of the child ("Happy") of said hippies. (Molly, during this whole part, is DYING, but more on that in a second.)

Which brings me to a third point — who knew I had so many points? — about Death novels: they tend to occur not in the mix of the larger, outside world but rather in leafy, close-knit environs, as if the assembled were only making a pit stop in the Elysian Fields to briefly acquaint the doomed member of their party with their future resting place before heading back to the land of the living.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," in which the speaker informs another Margaret that what she thinks is sorrow over the falling of leaves is really only sorrow for herself ("Margaret, are you weeping/Over Goldengrove unleaving?"), is the philosophical and aesthetic spine of the narrative. But as Molly's leukemia gets worse, the miniature village becomes even more isolated — though happily — in its ever-thinning grove. It's a happy isolation, and in its particulars made me remember a late-70s world that is now vanished, if it ever existed — one free of irony, in which the boundaries between adulthood and childhood were entirely permeable, in which teenagehood was not a state of isolation from one's adult familiars or a brief bridge to being a grown-up, but simply an alternative state, like being from France.

In this world, Meg is free to pursue serious photography simply because she enjoys it, not as a means to a collegiate end; Molly and Meg can befriend an elderly widower next door without anything being odd about it; a young couple can welcome two girls into their family not only as valued companions but as peers. Adults can be guides or students: When Molly wants to learn the names of all the flowers before she dies, Will teaches her; when Meg masters her darkroom, Will studies with her. And adults are never simply a stand-in for unpleasant authority: when Ben and Maria talk about wanting to get married by a river to guitar music, you know it's not simply to spite their rich parents. Most strikingly, when Meg is asked to photograph the (home!) birth of Ben and Maria's child, she only response is a mild inquiry from Will and her father, and the scene concerns mostly Meg's pleasure in her mastery over the camera and the vivid experience of watching a child being born, not a budding Annie Liebovitz but one wholly formed.

It's not only Meg who is given adult authority. When Meg and her father visit Molly on the verge of her death, her father has a surprising take on his daughter: "'This is a very hard thing to explain, Meg, but Molly is handling this thing very well by herself. She needs us, for our love, but she doesn't need us for anything else now.' He swallowed hard and said, 'Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do is be there when she wants us to be there.'"

Was this idea of preternatural maturity, this equality across generations, simply a wish on the part of the authors of this era? If you heard the plot of this book described, you would think that the adult part of the book was that Meg has to handle Molly dying. But in fact Meg and Molly were already wholly exposed to an adult world in which they thrive and are fully a part. The world of A Summer to Die made me think a bit of this article about Facebook by Peggy Orenstein, in which she wonders if the world of intimacy across generations, of constant contact with one's family and community, is not some new expression of mass narcissism but in fact the historical norm. It's only a few decades post-WWII in which we had the opportunity and expectation to separate from our family of birth, not simply be absorbed.

Maybe she has a point. After Molly's death, like the Margaret of the poem, Meg is counseled not by her parents but by Will, another kindly older man who gives her a portrait of herself that allows her to move on:

I knew, though I had not known it then, that Will had taken it. He had taken it in the village cemetary the day we buried Molly there and heaped her grave with goldenrod....There was something of Molly in my face. It startled me, seeing it. The line that defined my face, the line that separated the darkness of the trees from the light that curved into my forehead and cheek was the same line that had once identified Molly by its shape. The way I held my shoulders was the same way she had held hers. It was a transient thing, I knew, but when Will had held the camera and released the shutter of one five-hundredth of a second, he had captured and made permanent whatever of Molly was in me. I was grateful, and glad.

See, now the English major part of me wants to observe that the book begins with a line across a room that separates Molly and Meg (death), and the book ends with the line that brings them together (life), but THE HUMAN PART OF ME WANTS TO CRY. God, I have held off on the death part for eight paragraphs, which must be some kind of record. What can I say, I am trauma-avoidant. Fringed gentian is the grove filling with leaves again and pussy willows out of water symbolize what happens to Molly and— shut up, English major. What I will take away today is not only the symbolic import of fringed gentians (sob!), but the newly remembered observation that friends, like gentians, can grow in all kinds of places.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

Guys, you did wonderfully well on last week's quiz challenge, Partial Coverage, especially as Google is not really a help in these matters! Before I list the winners of a copy of Shelf Discovery, I point you to the gallery where you may find the answers to all (click here if the image below doesn't show up):

2009-07-21

The winners are AS FOLLOWS, in no particular order, only because some of you got some close to right which counted as a half point and...oy. You are winners, all! (If you won for reals though, please send me an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words "Partial Coverage Winner" in the subject line):

1. Jennifer Gibbons
2. Kerry Stubbs
3. Jen McCreary
4. Katherine Nelson
5. Jane Mendle
6. Jessica Calgione
7. Alston Erato
8. Bailey Beans (Beans, are you also above as real person up there? I will choose 11 because I think that was a double.)
9. Kidlitfan
10. ANin
11. AvantGardenia

You guys had the MOST trouble with Ludell and I Never Loved Your Mind. The Root Cellar and Jane-Emily strangely robust. I am WONDERFULLY IMPRESSED.

Okay last thing....Shelf Discovery was #400 ON AMAZON A LOT OF LAST WEEKEND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you guys!!!! Please continue to spread the word. If you have any interest, all kinds of press, and my blog, are on lizzieskurnick.com/news. I am actually very shortly going to do a post on black book covers prompted by the recent experience of my friend and YA writer Justine Larbalestier. You'll hear more about Ludell! Then I'll do a post on how you didn't know enough to scream, "I never loved your mind, Dewey Daniels! I never loved your mind!!!!!!!!!!!", something I always enjoy.

xoxoxo
Lizzie

One of the wonderful things about the books of this era, I have always felt, is the cover art — which not only showed us the girls in the novel, but showed them in such attentive specificity that even now just seeing the images again elicits a visceral aesthetic shock. To celebrate the pub date of Shelf Discovery, I wanted to celebrate the covers and not the innards for a change. I ALSO have 10 countem 10 copies to give away! So here's the deal:

Below, please find 21 (in honor of coming-of-age etc.) covers from my bookshelves. Some have appeared in the column, in which case I have used a different edition. Some have not. Some are major, some are minor. The rules are, in the comments, using each image's number, you name as many as you can. You are all on the honor system here, but as this quiz seems kind of hard I can't imagine cheating being of any use. You must go with your shelves and discoveries, ladies, and you have until Friday, when I will announce the winners! Those who have the most correct answers win, and in the cases of those with the same number of corrects you will win by time stamp. If you don't have a profile, please also feel free to email me your answers at jezziefinelines@gmail.com, and your own favorite covers, if you have them.

Good luck!


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BONUS, because have same cover model, which I think is funny:


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(p.s., a few of you have asked about the best ways to find out about tour dates and such. This is to friend me on FACEBOOK or check out my website, LIZZIESKURNICK.COM.)

In the children's literature pantheon of those who die too soon, there are two major types: the beautiful snoot who's killed off so that her uglier friend can guiltily brood forever upon her own ugliness and jealousy, and a vibrant being who helps a timid friend get bolder just in time to die in some typical act of heedlessness. (Fine Lines readers will here recall Bridge to Terabithia, as well as Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, in which a horse-tamer plunges off a tree to her end.) But I was introduced to death in the late 70s through Doris Buchanan Smith's A Taste of Blackberries, which for some time served as the semester's literary selection for 7-year-olds in my part of the country. (It was a kind of amuse-bouche for a main course of strangulation in Of Mice and Men.) And through the intervening decades, Buchanan's gentle, juice-stained depiction of early tragedy has, for me, set a standard neither Oprah pick nor Pen/Faulkner has ever faintly rivaled.

Young Jamie is the kind of friend who darts into a neighbor's garden to steal apples, hitches a ride in a car with a stranger, and pokes a stick right into a bee hive (more on that later). Though his best friend the narrator is, after all, the narrator, we never do find out his name. (Or do we? He's called "Chicken" by Jamie; "Honey," "Sweetie" or "Darling" — as in "Jamie is dead, darling" — by everyone else in the narrative.) But Jamie pays heavily for having top billing, as he's killed off just a few pages into the book when he pokes a stick into an underground beehive (see above), gets stung by the swarm of bees and goes into anaphylactic shock, then is left behind to die by our nameless narrator who assumes he is only fooling around, as usual.

After Jamie's death, the bulk of the narrative is taken up by our narrator's learning to cope, which actually follows the stages of grief from anger ("Jamie is a freak") to denial ("It seemed as long as I acted like Jamie wasn't dead, he wouldn't be dead anymore") to acceptance ("I cried and cried and cried"). Lying in a bath, the narrator tries to make soap lather to bring life back to Jamie; wandering in his neighbor's garden, he feels bad about trespassing. Looking at Jamie's younger sister, he decides he has to be a big brother for her now, and picks a bunch of blackberries for Jamie's mother, who says kindly that she'll bake them in a pie — an act that allows the narrator to release his guilt and run to play with the other neighborhood kids, who have been playing "'May I', but in hushed tones, because of Jamie."

When I was 7, these scenes, most of which barely span a hundred words, seemed vast swaths of narrative. I think that was less because I was a slow reader than because Buchanan so successfully rendered the way the smallest act in childhood takes on monumental significance — not only, of course, a death, but far smaller crimes, like stealing an apple, or triumphs, like figuring out how to string a tin-can phone across two windows (my friend and I never quite managed that one). In the world of a child, placing a flashlight up to your chin to make a spooky face can loom far larger in the memory than a tragic death, and while I remembered the narrator being frightened about wandering into Mrs. Mullins' garden without asking, I had forgotten entirely that as Jamie writhed on the ground, our protagonist left him to eat a popsicle.

I was going to have this Fine Lines focus heavily on the fine pencil illustrations of A Taste of Blackberries, which are so intrinsically connected to the book's quiet, melancholy power. But I moved this week, and unfortunately left my 1973 edition in some presently inaccessible pile. (That's what I get for being old and forgetful.) Instead I have the 1988 version, which seems to have mainly updated the illustrations in order to fit the hairstyles to that era. In the picture in the 70s edition, Jamie's mother has long straight hair parted in the middle and is wearing jeans and a loose shirt. Standing at her kitchen's screen door, she cups the narrator's chin with a kind of pre-Reagan-era intensity. Our 1988 mom has Farrah waves and a mom-like sweater, and her front door is graced with a nice plant. You can analyze which one is on the right side of history. Either way, Buchanan Smith is on the right side of childhood.

• • • • •

Ladies, it is less than T-minus 2 weeks to the publication of Shelf Discovery, and I could not be more in denial about it! I am completely lathering my chin up while everyone else goes to the funeral! However, there are going to be various items of publicity as well as various events to attend! If you want to know about them, you can do the following:

Friend me on FACEBOOK, where a cover gallery resides and people have made FUN YA QUIZZES;
Friend me on GOODREADS, where I am ignoring the 7893 books I would have to add to be accurate;
Visit me at HARPERCOLLINS, which has a fun template I fiddled with for an hour;
Follow me on TWITTER, which I don't understand but am trying to;
Sign up for my MAILING LIST, which will alert you to everything you need to know;
Go to LIZZIESKURNICK.COM, which will launch shortly and also have everything you need to know and is TO BOOT BEAUTEOUS thanks to my wonderful designer.

You can also PRE-ORDER THE BOOK! I just got it in the mail the other day and it is very pretty.

All of you giveaway winners, your books are coming. All of you quiz creators, send me your addresses. You can still win a book AUTOMATICALLY by creating a quiz on Facebook! (This is because I really just like having an excuse to take those quizzes.) Write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with all other demands/queries/items of information. Watched nephew today for three hours and am exhausted — how do you working moms do it? Respect! xoxoxo lizzie

A Taste Of Blackberries [Amazon]

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the feature in which we give a wrinkled look at the books we loved in our youth. This week, Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Little Women', Louisa May Alcott's 1868 uber-girl guide to solace through sacrifice and scrubbing.

• • • • •

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

I first read Little Women in college. Of course, I had read Little Women before college. Numerous times, in fact, throughout my childhood, in a vaguely seasonal rotation with the Little House books, An Old-Fashioned Girl, The Secret Garden, and Terms of Endearment. (The paperback of the latter was mis-shelved with YA books in my local bookstore. It is epic; you should read it.) Little Women was the first assignment in a popular cultural survey course of 19th-century literature, and that day, I looked scornfully about the room, confident that the yawning rows of fellow freshman in Tevas and baggy soccer shorts were unlikely to appreciate the narrative transcendence of Amy's turbulent sweeping-away of her accomplished trinkets from the Arts table or Meg's inability to make currants jell. (The violent, inappropriate wave of possessiveness that sweeps over whenever a work I treasure is up for public discussion is one of the many reasons I am unfit for book clubs.)

But, like many a March girl before me, I was about to be skewered on my own sharpened pride. The Dean immediately launched into a chuckling assessment of the March girls' first acts of Christmas celebration—namely, giving over all their pocket money for an improved set of gifts for Marmee, then donating their sumptuous breakfast feast to the far poorer family down the street—convulsing the lecture hall of 500 people for the entire 50 minutes. I, wondering what book they had read, was shaken to my very core. What was everyone laughing about? That's what you did with Christmas breakfast. Give it away! To the Hummels! How else could you become one of the four merriest girls in the city?

Thus must the early reader of Little Women immediately choose a side. One (WEARING TEVAS) finds not only the author's persistence in forcing the March girls to give up what they delight in but finding delight in such sacrifice completely inane. But another breed of reader unconsciously finds in the novel's cycle of desire and self-denial something as rare and delicious as pickled limes. For in the world of Little Women, there is no emotion so deeply felt it should not be vanquished, nor desire so great that it cannot be smacked down—and no end to the brilliant varietals of smackdown Alcott can concoct.

Take Amy. God forbid the poor girl should want to pay back her gross debt of pickled lime to her schoolfriends. For this act, she is beaten. (Beaten!) Likewise her ladies' lunch, which results in two days of tough chicken salad for the March family and only one quizzical guest. Pretty Meg wants to look prettier at dances. Dommage! There go her bangs in a burning frizzle—while another evening spent in borrowed finery earns her the scorn of family friend Laurie as well as this crushing condemnation by the host: "They are making a fool of that little girl: I wanted you to see her, but they have spoilt her entirely." When Amy burns Jo's manuscript in an extraordinary act of pique, it's not bad enough that Jo has lost years of work—she's not even allowed to be mad at Amy, for no sooner has she decided to never speak to her sister again than said sister crashes through thin ice into a freezing river.

I have always found the last instance the most profoundly unjust of the lot (especially since, in a kind of family-style Freudian PTSD, the entire family insists on making the joke, "Does genius burn, Jo?" every time she puts on her scribble cap to write), but I became especially interested in it when one of Shelf Discovery's Facebook friends reminded me of the following passage, in which Marmee encourages Jo to exercise still more control over her anger:

"Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it."

"Yours, mother? Why, you are never angry!" and, for the moment, Jo forgot remorse in surprise.

"I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so."

That's exactly the kind of passage you skip over as a girl to race ahead to Amy's putting a clothespin on her nose to make it more Grecian, but stop dead on as a woman, having earlier completely failed to grasp that Marmee is more than a gracious creature in a gray bonnet sweeping in and out of the house on her way to do good works. Because: Why is she angry, exactly? Why, could it have anything to do with the following two asides about Mr. March?

"Don't you wish we had the money Papa lost when we were little, though?"
and
"I think it was so splendid for Papa to go as a chaplain when he was too old to be drafted, and not strong enough to be a soldier!"

Having your husband lose all your money, then head off to join an army that does not particularly want him, leaving you alone to do all you can to keep your four daughters from becoming the even poorer Hummels down the street, might conceivably inspire some rage—as well as a slightly outsized insistence on pointing out the sunny side of every type of deprivation. (Meg and Amy aren't smacked down simply for wanting nice things—they're smacked down because many nice things are above the March's means.) For Marmee, knowing there's nothing she can do personally to improve their financial situation, has two choices: let the girls wallow in misery, or encourage a kind of demented cozifying of all that is unfortunate. (Oh, Alcott: Find me even the most intrepid lady today who will thrill to the happy rat who keeps her company in her office.)

Because while that chuckling professor (can you believe I'm STILL this enraged about it?) seemed to grasp what was ludicrous in Marmee and the March girls' cheery grate-scrubbing, I don't think he saw that Marmee was ludicrous....like a fox. Because while Marmee asked the girls to deprive themselves of almost everything, there was one gift she allowed them: work. Witness:

"Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for everyone; it keeps us from ennui and mischief, is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of independence better than money or fashion."

And when did Marmee conceive of the great powers of work? Why, pretty much around the time when her husband lost all of their money!

"When I was first married, I used to long for my new clothes to wear out or get torn, so that I might have the pleasure of mending them; for I got heartily sick of doing fancywork and tending my pocket handkerchief....it was play then, but there came I time when I was truly grateful that I possessed not only the will but the power to cook wholesome food for my little girls, and help myself when I could not afford to hire help."

When there is no other option, work means independence. And, by and by (oh, can we bring back "by and by"!), it is not through the girls' marrying well or depriving themselves that the March family thrives, but because of Jo's own work—her writing career. Alcott, in one of her happy meta-moments, waxes blobbily on the great virtues thereof ("one of the sweet uses of adversity is the genuine satisfaction which comes from hearty work of head or hand; and to the inspiration of necessity we owe half the wise, beautiful and useful blessings of the world") until she finally gets to a salient point: "Jo enjoyed a taste of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy richer girls, taking great comfort in the knowledge that she could supply her own wants..." (italics mine)

Put Alcott's moralizing aside, and you see that the sisters who use their own work to become independent are rewarded, and the sisters who self-abnegate are not. Modest Meg fades into domestic obscurity and Beth is summarily killed off, while Jo is not only allowed to continue in her writing career but arranges things so that she can preside over an entire troop of rough-and-tumble boys with her doting, learned husband. (I know Friedrich is often regarded as something of a punishment. It is rather a shock to your average eight-year-old to have Laurie usurped by some ursine old expatriot, but I always liked him.) Amy's vanity is not tamped down but allowed to bloom: she is given not only true love but made mistress of a house where she can become a great benefactress of the arts. And thus, Christmas breakfasts notwithstanding, the two creative, independent March girls thrive through pursuing their desires, not setting them aside.

When Jo first sets out in the world to sell her stories, an editor rejects them, telling her, "'People want to be amused, not preached at, you know. Morals don't sell nowadays.'" Alcott appends this wisdom with: "....which was not quite a correct statement, by the way." Yes. Oh Professor (still bitter! Still annoyed!), it's not that Alcott's morals were silly. It's that you were looking at the wrong morals.

• • • • •

Hello, beauties! Speaking of not setting aside our desires and pursuing creativity etc., here are some demands:

Follow me on TWITTER
Friend Shelf Discovery on FACEBOOK
Friend, Follow or Fan me on GOODREADS
Visit my malware-free BLOG
Sign up for my MAILING LIST
Buy the BOOK!
I was on NPR's All Things Considered talking about great girl heroines. LISTEN

I know, I know, what have I done for you lately? But even though I am not doing a lot at many of these places yet—being this 2.0 is taxing even my enormous ability to overshare, to say nothing of the fact that I feel that Marmee somehow would disapprove—I can assure you that a big portion of what will be going on involves GIVEAWAYS and FUN QUIZZES and EVENTS and PLOTFINDER CONTESTS and possibly a Jacob Have I Loved mug!

Speaking of Plotfinders, first, last week's winner. I am going to go out on a limb and say it is Michelle S. for "Watcher in the Woods," but commenter AFever can also have a galley for guessing Sarah Armstrong's "Blood Red Roses," because I really don't know which one it is. Amy G., do these ring a bell? Winners, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your addresses for your GALLEYS!

THIS week's Plotfinder comes from Esi H., because Hayseed and Armpit, you can't make this stuff up:

Here's the plot (I think): There's this young girl, who may be new to the town. She makes friends with another girl, and I think they hang out in an orchard/ field with a tower? And there's this wise old man who may be the caretaker or gardener or something along those lines. Anyway, the girl's friend finds other people to hang out with, and I think our protagonist finds herself all alone. Maybe she gets another friend over time too, I can't recall. I do remember some sort of scene where our protagonist bumps into Ex-Friend and Ex-Friend's new friends and somebody is all teary (protagonist?) and excuses it by saying it's her allergies to hayseed. And then the friend she got replaced by is now being replaced as well? There might also be some sort of sister who goes out with a guy who has a bad muffler on his car and they drive around with her face in his armpit. But that might be another book entirely. Sorry this is all so vague! Hope someone can help me out!

Send your answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com or put them in the comments! First one to answer correctly gets free copy of Shelf Discovery galley or finished book, whichever arrives first.

AND ONE LAST THING...

We are working up some delicious quizzes for your delectation. HOWEVER. I do not want to write them all, mainly because I will leave out lots of good stuff. So if you would like a chance to win a copy of Shelf Discovery, send me your sample quiz questions about your favorite books to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with QUIZ in the subject line, along with your mailing address! We will be randomly picking entrants to win copies of the book.

What do I mean by questions? Here is an example:

"When Cal returns from the war to Rass in 'Jacob Have I Loved,' Louise smears what on her hands?"

a) Cheap lotion
b) Saltwater
c) Her sister's left-behind perfume

ANSWER: A

OR

"In what Paula Danziger book does a girl trade her lunch for a peanut-butter-and-bean-sprout sandwich?"

ANSWER: The Divorce Express

You can also make a Facebook quiz, like, "What classic child heroine are you?" I am supposed to do this, I know, but YOU WILL DO IT BETTER. Any Facebook quizzers AUTOMATICALLY win copies of Shelf Discovery.

Congrats and good luck!

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the feature in which we give a wrinkled look at the YA books we loved as youth. Today, Lizzie Skurnick rereads Down A Dark Hall, Lois Duncan's thriller about a residence where artists can really colonize.

They had been driving since dawn, and for the past two hours, since they had turned off the highway onto the winding road that led through hill country, Kit Gordy had been sleeping.

Oh, Lois. Was it a particularly impatient agent? An editor enforcing a deadline? Simply way too many assignments at once? Because, as taxing and unbearable as the life of a writer is, I am still wildly curious to know what last straw made you leave off your mastery of plain old brainwashing and body-stealing to rework that trope as a new vision of the muse: a jostling crowd of nasty artist ghosts ready to snatch the pen from your hand and steal your brain outright.

Before we begin, I have to confess that, last night, in the rain-wracked silence of my apartment, I was so scared of this book I had to stop reading. I mean, I literally stopped reading and threw the book down and was like, maybe it's time for some Glimpses of the Moon before bed. Then I got up and checked all the windows and doors, and I decided I would leave off my customary car alarm-blocking ear plugs because if a malevolent ghost were to sneak in, it would be good to have a jump on her, especially if the icy freezing cold that customarily heralds a spectral presence were to get offset by my duvet.

Because, to put a question I have considered for decades straight to you...what is it that makes Duncan so terrifying? Is it her stubborn refusal to use contractions? ("I will not talk to them, she told herself. I have nothing to say to them.") Is it the mildly panicked onslaught of em-dashes? ("'I'll never be at home here!' Kit cried. 'Can't you feel it, Mom? There's something about this place—something—'") Or maybe it has something to do with this type of thing:

She could not find the word she was seeking, and so she fell silent as the house grew nearer and nearer and then was upon them....And then Kit knew the word for which she had been searching. The word was "evil."

In any case. Down a Dark Hall is the TERRIFYING, UNBEARABLY FEAR-INDUCING story of one Kit Gordy—likable, pleasant and square-jawed—who, when we encounter her, is in the process of being deposited at the extremely selective Blackwood boarding school for girls, the better for her new stepfather to privately enjoy her mother's company on a months-long European honeymoon. (Ubiquitous Duncian enraging assertion of unearned authority by a male interloper: Kit: "I still don't see why I couldn't go to Europe with you and Dan...I'm fourteen and can look after myself." Dan: "No more, now. You're upsetting your mother.")

She is joined shortly not by a throng but by only three other students: the quiet Sandra Mason (sprinkle of freckles, elfin face), bubbly Lynda Hannah (pretty, dumb), and the stolidly bright Ruth Stark (downy shadow across her upper lip, Daughters of Eve Irene's progenitor?). Rounding out the crew are headmistress Madam Duret, French, imperious and eye-boring (is there any other kind?), her handsome, delicate son Jules, and the totally creepy Professor Farley, who is the type of character who hangs around simply to deliver terrifying philosophical pronouncements once a crisis has come to a head. ("If nothing comes from this experience but one short poem by one of the immortal poets of history, it will be worth more than the lives of four commonplace youngers.")

Getting ahead of myself! The girls' first days at Blackwood are as normal as they can be, at least for ones spent in an institution in which students are placed in velvet-canopied beds in rooms that only lock from the outside. But when Lynda, a heretofore unremarkable student (Ruth's generous verdict: "The day they delivered brains, Lynda was out to lunch") produces a masterful sketch of Kit, things begin to go awry. Sandra, visited by a gentle woman she calls Ellis, starts to produce reams of beauteous (if slightly outdated) poetry. Ruth finds herself jotting down equations that surpass even her 150-IQ comprehension, while Kit, dreaming of delicate piano melodies every night, awakens still-fatigued, with suspiciously achy fingers.

Spoiler. Yes! Yes! They are being possessed by the ghosts of artists past! Even more awesome, they are possessed by famous ghosts of the past: for Sandra, one Emily Bronte; for Kit, Franz Schubert; for Lynda, the painter Thomas Cole; and for Ruth, all the great mathematicians of all time. (Who could even name one dead mathematician?) Once Ruth figures out that they all have ESP (Ruth can read people's minds; Kit and Sandra have been visited by their dead parents; Lynda remembers a former life under Queen Victoria), it is only a hop, spook and a jump to the realization that, not only do Madam Duret and Professor Farley know that the girls are producing great works of art from the beyond, they're willing to sacrifice them to the venture entirely. (See above: "lives of four commonplace youngsters.")

For those of you who have not yet read the work, I will not ruin the Turn of the Screw-cum-Girls of Canby Hall enjoyment beyond what I already have. (Pretty much totally.) But upon my reread (sorry, must ruin further), I found it telling that the crisis occurs not because the ghosts want to come back from the dead or something—but simply because the ghosts' art becomes, in all senses, bad.

Duncan may have been a bit wearied by the demands of the muse, but just as body-snatching, in Stranger With My Face, is a vehicle to discuss the true nature of family, here, Duncan here uses body-snatching to discuss the cost of personal liberty.

Witness Kit's confrontation of the wimpy Jules, defending his mother's scheme:

"My mother has a gift, a marvelous one. She's given you a chance to help enrich the world. Why do you find that so upsetting?"

"Why do I find it upsetting!" Kit regarded him incredulously. "How would you feel, being used as a kind of vehicle for dead people!"

After all, it's not only Madame Duret and Professor Farley who are perfectly happy to sacrifice Kit's life for their own goals. It's also her mother and new stepfather, who are gently insistent that she enjoy the life they've planned for her, her own feelings be damned. But despite this, Kit, arriving at Blackwood, knows her own identity matters too.

Looking at herself in her new room's creepy mirror, she thinks the following:

"Who am I?" the eyes asked. "What is my place in the world? Am I pretty? Do people like me? Does Jules like me? In what direction am I going? Will I accomplish anything worthwhile in my lifetime? Will I be happy? Am I worth loving?"

Lynda's portrait of Kit is valuable, to be sure. But what Down a Dark Hall reminds us is that it doesn't matter what pictures other people create for us. It's everybody's job—and right—to draw that picture for themselves.

Down A Dark Hall [Amazon]

Previous 'Fine Lines' Posts [Tag Page]

• • • • •

Yay! Okay, first, thanks to Lisa G. for the picture above. Second, I'm finally going to stop being a slug and announce last week's Plotfinder winners, as well as the winners from two weeks ago.

From last week's NFIFG, the winners are:

1. Emailer Ariana U., for Invisible Lissa, by Natalie Honeycutt. Actually, officially Hortense won this. But can employees WIN Jezebel contests? I do not know. Hortense, you may have a copy too.

2. Commenter AdelaideDinosaur, BY A HAIR, for Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

And from AYTGIMM, the winners are:

1. Emailer Laura A for Kelly & Me/Adeline Street, by Caroline Lynch Williams.

2. Commenter southernbitch for Why Me?, By Deborah Kent.

3. Commenter HielanLass for A Deadly Game of Magic, by Joan Lowery Nixon.

If you won, congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your address, and I will dispatch your galley of Shelf Discovery immediately!

This week's Plotfinder comes from Amy G., and I LUVS Witch's Sister too:

This is a horror/mystery YA novel involving a family who either rents a vacation home in the woods for the summer or moves there permanently. The main character is a teenage girl who's creeped out by the house and has visions of something horrible that happened there in the past. There's a small town full of muttering townfolk; a cute stable boy she has a flirtation with; and, most uniquely, a creepy nursery rhyme that goes something like "blood-red roses, rose-red blood" that only the heroine heres. There's the definite suggestion that the heroine's burgeoning sexuality connects her with a grizzly axe murder (or something of that nature), and she may even get possessed by the killer at some point.

I realize it's a pretty generic plot, but the "blood-red roses" thing is pretty distinctive, and I've had no luck on Google. (Though Google did help me find "Witch's Sister" and "Spider Doll", some other creepy books my mom apparently picked up at random book fairs.)

As always, email your answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or enter below in comments. Winner gets free galley of Shelf Discovery!

Also:

You can BUY Shelf Discovery by clicking here

You can sign up for my MAILING LIST by clicking here

And you can friend me on Facebook through this marvelous badge thingie! Facebook people get to vote on what book I do, when I'm not feeling dictatorial:

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Enjoy the weekend!!!!!!!
Lizzie

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade', Barthe DeClements 1981 classic about weight loss, multiplication and mean, mean mamas.

Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade is not Blubber. (No flensers, no French tutor.) It is also not Me and Fat Glenda. (Of this, I remember nothing except the cover of the sequel, Hey, Remember Fat Glenda? in which the now-slim heroine in question sports a beribboned sweetheart neckline on a flowered dress.) It's also not The Cat Ate My Gymsuit (teddy bears, academic insurrection), nor whatever Sweet Valley High in which a character melts pounds off to reveal a face and bod that rival those of the Wakefield twins. (You tell me!)

But you could be forgiven for confusing Nothing's Fair with the first two, because it hews to a similar storyline: a hefty new girl arrives in the classroom, is immediately and crashingly rejected by her new peers, fails to redeem herself through her likeable personality or other admirable traits, but finally manages to get ushered into the social circle through the narrator, a naturally skinny girl (peanut butter and cookies figure largely in her diet) who, after being forced into close contact with A FAT PERSON, realizes it's not an actionable quality.

Jenifer (ah, remember that particular 80s-era spelling?) is skinny and secure-ish in a social pecking order that includes her bossy friend Diane, her snooty friend Sharon, and Jack, the brindle bulldo- I mean Jack, the cute redhead who hates his hair and therefore torments the girls mercilessly. When their new classmate, Elsie, arrives in the classroom, the students' verdict is evenly divided between "Ugh," "I hope she isn't going to be in this room," and "Gross." (The author herself weighed in, entitling the chapter "The Fat Blond Girl.")

And it only gets worse. Presaging her future role as diplomat, Jenifer observes, "I thought her mouth turned down sadly," then moves onto the more pertinent, "I knew everyone hated having Elsie in our room." Even that breath of empathy is short-lived: Elsie, on a strict diet, begs for other people's desserts (an action for which she earns the nickname 'scrounge'), gets 100% on tests (Jenifer is failing math), and finally is found to be the one swiping other students' lunch quarters to spend on chocolate and licorice whips. (Jenifer, in fact, is the one catches her plunking down quarters at the corner store for the latter, then turns her in: "I knew," she tells us, "I had looked into the eyes of a thief.")

The classroom-based narrative is a distinct entity, one that endures because the classroom stands in for the larger social structure of childhood: a delicate petri dish in which authority rules with an unpredictable hand and the tiniest action can upset every other organism. Take Elsie's fatness: as she stands before the class, her condition is less a trait than a probable contagion, the odiferous egg-salad sandwich in the unlucky individual's lunchbag that taints the bearer beyond salvation. Winnowed down to such a narrow focus, each child's brain is similarly without filters: the judgments that float through Jenny's brain — say, that her friend Sharon is extremely piggy about gifts, or that Diane was plenty bossy before her father died — pass effortlessly through her consciousness, while our adult selves tamp down or seek to mitigate similar thinking, remembering on some atavistic level that such judgments could imprison you in the pecking order well into adolescence.

But why shouldn't children judge? Because the other side of childhood Barthe DeClements depicts so unsparingly is how ruthlessly children are judged. In the world of Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade, your every action is brimming with consequence. Not only can spilling graham crackers on the floor get you smacked across the bottom with a broom (Don't Hurt Elsie!), wanting to eat more than broth and carrots could get you kicked out of school. Eating too much at dinner and grossing out your father's new girlfriend might make him never come around again — and don't even get me started on what might happen if you hit someone with a baseball bat by mistake.

And it's partly by observing the adult world come crashing down on any infraction of Elsie's with the force of 10-thousand tons that activates Jenifer's sense of injustice (hence the title), as the experience of injustice in her world had heretofore been limited to having to tolerate her little brother too often. And miraculously, it travels back up to the ruling parties. First, Jenifer's mother takes the girls out to buy records when Elsie's math tutoring brings up Jenifer's grades. Next, Diane's mother takes Elsie's clothes from her at a sleepover and takes them in where Elsie's pinned them. (After Elsie's mother calls to scream that she can fix her own child's clothes, in a particularly satisfying incident, Diane's mother screams back, "Good! It's about time you paid some attention to her!" and slams down the phone.) By the time Elsie manages to make two more major screwups, Jenifer has created a network that make sure Elsie's "mean, mean mama," in the words of Jenifer's little brother, doesn't send Elsie to boarding school.

There's a sub-theme I hadn't picked up on as a child: that when the girls make their grandest mistake — hitchhiking to a local shopping mall, with temporarily disastrous consquences — it's because Jenifer's mom has recently gotten a job and her generally amiable father, irritated at being un-manned by a working wife, has abandoned the children for his weekly bowling game. (I SWEAR this studiously offhand theme in these novels made me a raging feminist by age 10.) When the affair ends soundly, her father quips, "I guess your job isn't worth all this trouble, eh?" and the Jenifer's mother shoots back, "Or your bowling isn't worth all this trouble."

So: Alongside the children learning to become fair to each other, the adults have become fairer, too. And for them, it's just ugly. "I was fat," Elsie says to her new friends as the book closes. "Let's face it. I wasn't just fat. I was gross." "And we were mean," Jenifer chimes back. You're not likely to see quite that level of frankness in your average morality tale nowadays. ("Let's face it...I was gross" isn't quite the message we try to send young girls.) But that's because DeClements isn't focused on the fat. She's saying that the truth—and this is so unfair—is that the truthis so unfair.

• • • • • •

Ladies, I am a mean, mean columnist. I have to go watch my nephew at the park and I have no time to pick through your 900 clever and true answers to announce the Plotfinder winners this week. I will announce you next week! I promise! And now, this week's Plotfinder. (Answer in the comments or by email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com: first correct answer wins galley of the book.)

Okay, I'm doing two. GARG! They're just so funny. Thanks, Nicole T.:

Okay, I've got two for you (and I've been dying to ask for months):

#1:
Middle-school aged girl, outcast-ish. Has a little brother with a lisp who I think was supposed to be cute and endearing but who I found to be incredibly irritating as a character. Made celery sticks with cream cheese and raisins to share with friends at school, which sounded revolting to me. Cheerleading uniforms made of felt - and I think they were soccer cheerleaders? There were two male classmates, one with a thing for warts and the other with knobby knees (who may have been likened to a grasshopper at some point). A big school project that entailed crafting tiny clay native americans with ambiguous genitals. And above all, the FUNCHY Club - there was a club called FUNCHY, very exclusive as I recall, but I have no idea wtf FUNCHY means, and it shall drive me insane unless I find out.

#2:
The protagonist is a high-schooler whose name starts with a T (Tess? Tish?). T has teased bangs and exceptionally crappy parents - dad was abusive/absent, and mom just up and abandons T and her sibling (little brother?) early in the book. This was a pretty short read (100 pages or so) and focuses on T trying to survive without anyone knowing that her parents had bailed. I remember T shoplifting ground beef by stuffing it in her parka and trying to figure out how to keep the utilities on. The book ends when the family moves to Florida with the grandparents and T is confounded by the flat, straight hairstyles. The title is addressed to one of T's teachers - like, "Dear Ms So-and-so, Something Something."

YAY! Again, answers below or to jezziefinelines@gmail.com.

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BUY THE BOOK. It is the prettiest, most delightful book in the land.

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And GO outside! It's a beautiful day.

xooxxo
Lizzie

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the feature where we give a sentimental look at the YA books we loved in our youth. This week, Lizzie Skurnick tackles Judy Blume's 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.'

Are you there God? It's me, Margaret. We're moving today. I'm so scared God. I've never lived anywhere but here. Suppose I hate my new school? Suppose everyone there hates me? Please help me God. Don't let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you.

Don't let New Jersey be too horrible....was there ever a greater metaphor for the terror one feels at the onset of pubescence? (I'm from Bergen Country and live in Jersey City — so no haters, please.) But, in her merest, timid request, the person of Margaret Simon, the character who introduced young girls everywhere, and I do mean young girls everywhere, to the notion of getting their periods, puts her finger exactly on how it feels to start to grow up. It's not like an exciting trip to Radio City Music Hall with Grandma. It's a long, featureless ride in the other direction, culminating in an blank exit ramp off a highway into a town without anyone you know.

Before I continue, I must pre-apologize as I scrupulously never pre-apologize and say: It's difficult for a teen columnist to write about AYTGIMM. It's like being a writer for Rolling Stone and being seated next to Keith Richards on a six-hour flight, or an artisanal chef given access to a store of black-market ricotta. I feel awed and unworthy, and as if whatever I do will perforce not be enough — if I even knew what to do in the first place.

Now! Apologia in place. Let us move on to the person of Margaret Simon. I had not visited with Margaret for a while, and thus only remembered her late-hour duck into a church's confessional and the velvet hat that she wore to Rosh Hoshana services. (You girls stuck on two minutes in the closet: you are filthy, filthy!) But for those who can only call up the dim memory of a pink sanitary belt and some stray hairs held up with bobby pins, here's Margaret's deal: her parents, whether to have more garden space, put her in public school, or get her oh-so-gently get out from under the thumb of her father's doting Jewish mama, have moved to Farbrook, NJ. Margaret, an only child, is flat-chested and bra-less — though not aware that she should care about those things until instructed to by her new neighbor, Nancy. She is also church- and temple-less, and also not aware that this is strange until instructed so by her new neighbor, Nancy. Concerned about what God, bras and friends like Nancy mean to her present and future, she embarks on a quest to figure it all out — knowing that some form of benediction will come when she finally receives proof positive she IS growing up in the first place: viz, the arrival of her period.

Margaret's new life in Farbrook is a far cry from her old life in New York, filled with private schools, concerts with Grandma and the stimulation of the big city. But the static petri dish of suburbia is a far better medium for emotional growth. There is her first opportunity to compare her life to that of other girls her age — "The first thing I noticed about Nancy's room was the dressing table with the heart-shaped mirror over it.....When I was little I wanted a dressing table like that I never got one though, because my mother likes tailored things" — as well as more boys hanging around to ogle, like lawn-mower Moose Freed. There's the public school where she sees sex films and is asked by her nervous Columbia Teacher's College grad-teacher about her views on religion and male teachers, and a new group of girl friends, the PTS's (Pre-Teen Sensations!) who, together, do the important work of growing up, like getting bras, waiting for their periods, and writing lists of the boys they like — then saying nasty things about the one girl in their class who has her period, really needs a bra, and does not lack for male attention.

For the entire span of this column, there has never been a time when I could not return back to both the moment in time when I read the book as well as re-experience exactly what it was like to do so. But in re-reading AYTGIMM, I was deeply disturbed to find I couldn't do either. I remember well what happened AFTER I read it. (I went up to my mother, said, "What's a period?" and when, after she responded darkly, "Who told you about THAT?" learned all about ovaries, fallopian tubes and ovulation from her very fine illustration.) And I remember very well WHAT it was like to read it — to be firmly ensconced in Margaret's psyche and her life in Farbrook, to be competitive with Nancy, delighted by Moose, happy to see Grandma, annoyed to have my Florida vacation ruined by my awful Ohio grandparents — and desperate, desperate for an excuse to finally pull out the Teenage Softies I'd been hiding under my bed.

But on this return — the events of Margaret's life seemed thin to me, and her concerns so very distant. Rather than feeling like I could reexperience everything with her, I felt nothing so much as if I were spying.

And — do you know what? I think I was. Because there is nothing thin about the events of Margaret's life, and nothing small about her concerns. There is nothing more charged than the year we girls start to think about sex. (Margaret doesn't talk to God because she's religious — she talks to him because she can't figure out who else could safely hold all this powerful information.)

I know one thing — I'm not sure I can. Because, like any club, "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" might be an institution made for a certain kind of member during a certain kind of time, and this old lady has no more business being there than Moose Freed does listening at the door. (After all, now I'm closer to grandma Sylvia Simon's age — ACK! — than Margaret's.) So, I look forward to hearing from you all in the comments about your memories, but I'm going to let my memories stay safely they belong — with me, at age 7, about to run up and ask my mother about this whole "period" thing.

Goodbye, Margaret! Goodbye, girlhood! And — saddest — goodbye, PTS's.

• • • • •

Okay, first of all, Hi. I mean, Hi! Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Hello my beauties! I am so sorry I left you behind for so long and I missed you so! I have no excuse for my absence at all but to say, I can't do anything in February, but this year, February lasted from October until now. (Thank God it's finally March!) But Fine Lines has returned and now will appear biweekly, alternating with Shelf Pleasuring, which is to say, I will be here twice a month and all about you and your YA.
Some minor housekeeping thingies:

I have a profile on Facebook! Friend me there! You can see a) Shelf Discovery's new cover, b) many OLD covers, and c) one vast desert of non-postings. I will post more now, promise.

I have a mailing list! Join It! When you do, I think it sends you all the old messages too. Do not be confused by this. I will add some new ones.

I have a book! You might want to purchase it! You can buy it here, or, if you do like that, here.

I have a blog. Do not visit my blog. It is hacked and infested with spyware and a brilliant Roumanian developer is fixing it, but he is not done yet. Don't go to my blog.

Now! Onto Plotfinders.

I know I am so backlogged on Plotfinders that a) I can't remember which ones I ran and b) I can't remember who is up next. In honor of the title of same, I have simply decided to put here an abundance of Katherines. Since the column is now only running twice a month, I am switching the prize from a column choice to either a galley or a young adult novel of my collection, depending on my publisher's generosity. Let's hope a galley! I want to KEEPS my books, pretties!

From Catie C.:

I have a book in mind but cannot for the life of me remember the title of it. The plot revolves around two sisters - possibly twins - one of whom dies from a brain aneurysm on the first day of school after complaining of a headache. She had asked for pop-tarts for breakfast that morning, and the mother feels guilty later for having denied her daughter's pop tart wishes. The story may have taken place in Florida, and I seem to recall the surviving sister wearing a stuffy black velvet dress to the funeral. This book also had a sequel, the title of which was an address, such as "9 Adelaide". I think the street name started with an "A", although I could be making that up, and I remember the house having a stained glass window in the living room, although I may have invented that too. In the sequel, the protagonist (who is the surviving twin from the first book) goes on a fishing trip with two men (possibly her Dad and her Uncle?) and drinks beer, then drinks swamp water to quench her thirst. I also remember her spending time with her grandmother, although that could have happened in the first book. It's a long shot, but any ideas?

From Katie M.:

I think the title might have been something along the lines of "Why Me?", but that's not showing up in Google searches. It was about a normal girl whose kidneys suddenly failed. She had to go through the whole dialysis thing, strictly regulating liquids, etc. I remember her quitting ballet lessons because the dialysis tube showed through her leotard. Of course, she was looking for a kidney transplant, but the catch is she was adopted. So she had to hunt down her birth mother. I remember her being successful in finding her, but then I either lost the book or had to return it to the library or something, and I never found out what happened. Any idea what it might be? Thank you!

From Katherine S.:

OK, I read this book again and again, probably in the late 80s. There are 4 teenagers, 2 guys and 2 girls (I think one of the guys is black and the other is an angry, angry racist redneck-type, but I'm not positive), coming back from some sort of acting competition/performance, when for some reason they have to stop (their car beaks down?), and they go to this creepy old house for help. Creepiness ensues, and they're trapped in the house. I think the house belongs to an old guy who is into magic tricks. The main character is a girl who is into magic tricks. They all have black tights and turtlenecks, because that is what they wore at the competition, and in order to escape or outwit the creepy guy, they wear all black and cut off parts of extra tights to put over their hands and faces so that they can hide in the shadows, and the main character girl does something where she figures out how to hide in the false bottom (or escape out of the false bottom) of a trunk that a magician would use for a disappearing act. And I'm pretty sure the two girls and the two guys end up in couples by the end. That's all I got. Help, please!

You know the rules — or, if you don't, here are the rules! First reader to call the correct answer either in the comments or in an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com wins whatever I can devise as a prize. Three books, three winners this week.

You can also send me your Plotfinders to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, as you can any other information you feel you need to impart.

Again: I MISSED YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,
Lizzie

Fine Lines (All Previous Columns)
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret [Amazon]

The enduring lure of the YA is no secret to the Jez community; see "Fine Lines", where the genre gets its due. (By the way, "Fine Lines" is coming back next Friday.) Harry Potter has long since made it acceptable to read a juvie title on public transport, and the Twilight phenom is not news. But it seems to have opened the floodgates: according to the PW article, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is another big crossover hit, as is Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Both of these deal with decidedly "adult" themes, but with the energy and optimism of YA prose.

We keep reading that the economy's prompting nostalgia and comfort reads, so it's not a shocker that people should return to old favorites - or even just want to return to a time when problems were simpler and you could throw yourself completely into a book. Lately, my reading seems to be evenly divided between Serious and Escapist; Simone Weil and a charming novel called the Tea Shop Girls. Comfort reads need not be cozy, though; sometimes the comfort comes from the sense that, however scary - see the forces of evil in Harry Potter or His Dark Materials - the fight will be won, problems are controllable, and more to the point, within the reader's hands. Invariably the protagonists of these books have the power to change things. Important developmental lessons for young people, but no small comfort to adults in times when we feel like the Gayles' house just before Munchkin Land.

One funny point the PW article makes is that the adult women buying these books are greedy: they tend to buy whole series at a time, unwilling to wait between books. I get it - we can afford to do this now, and know to seize our pleasures where we find them - but I wonder if we're not missing some of the point. After all, when you're younger time moves slower; don't you want to make the illusion complete?

Adult Readers In The Kids' Section [Publishers Weekly]

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'The Long Winter', the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic wherein our heroine Laura twists hay while the sun don't shine.

The mowing machine's whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay.

I ask you: have you ever heard a statement of such dread foreboding, of such grave intimations of abject harm, of such pathos and heartache and misery? In the days when your 401-K was booming, I know you would have answered, Um, yes. But unfortunately, now we know quite well what can follow a booming growth season, one in which we busily cut our bluestem for hay in the warm weather, believing in the next season, the sun above will restore it with cheerful regularity.

The Long Winter, for those of you who (shame!) never made it the entire way through the Little House series, picks up with the family when Laura is fourteen, and tells the story of an epic winter that strikes the tiny town of De Smet, South Dakota, nearly starving out all of its inhabitants. When I first picked up the book for a Fine Lines reread, I was quite sure that I'd be interested mostly in the domestic details of the Ingalls family (always a dependable fix for those addicted to frontier porn): the twisting of hay to for makeshift "logs" when the coal runs out, grinding the wheat all day in the coffee grinder because without the constant labor, there wouldn't be enough to make bread; making a green pumpkin pie when the first frost kills the crop; finally getting a Christmas barrel filled with calico scarves and salt pork once the "Chinook" blows, the spring comes and the trains start running. (Let's also not forget that this is the book where Almanzo and Laura first meet cute, when she and sister Carrie stumble upon him, twinkling blue eyes and all, haying before the winter sets in.) However. As dedicated to such joys as ever, I cannot help but at this juncture read the work primarily as a treatise about the perils of globalization, government oversight, concentration of power in the hands of unregulated industries, resource-related market volatility, and oats.

1. The Claim

When we catch up with them, Ma and Pa (and their De Smet neighbors) have just entered their era's version of a Fannie Mae-backed mortgage, a homestead claim — meaning simply that, in exchange for breaking and settling the land, the settlers will own it. Those of us who have been devoting the requisite amount of attention to the Ingalls over the years know that this is a step up from the subsistence level the family has previously enjoyed — first, from the Little House in the Big Woods, a Wisconsin cabin where Pa trapped, hunted and fished out all the family's needs; then to the Banks of Plum Creek, where Pa first broke ground as a farmer; then to the Shores of Silver Lake, where Pa worked on the railroad in order to earn the money to buy the claim in the first place.

By taking the claim, like all settlers, they've now entered into an uneasy relationship with both the market and the government. Whereas before, they depended utterly on themselves, they're now part of the landscape of both the town and the market — their livelihood and labors intextricably linked to what the railroad bringeth and the railroad taketh away.

This is of course, progress of sorts, one in which the Ingalls' world expands immeasurably from the small cabin where it began, where the Ingalls might spend all winter alone with only a bear for company, and no schoolteacher for the girls but Ma. But taking the claim also leaves them exposed in a way they never were in their snug log cabin — literally, since the claim shanty is only a shack covered with tar paper. It's a housing crisis of its own kind, a fact brought home soundly as Pa, worried, examines a muskrat house that's been built thicker than one he's ever seen in his life:

Laura put her hand on the wall of their house. The coarse plaster was hot in the hot wind and sunshine, but inside the thick mud walls, in the dark, the air must be cool. She liked to think of the muskrats sleeping there.

Pa was shaking his head. "We're going to have a hard winter," he said, not liking the prospect.

"Why, how do you know?" Laura asked in surprise.

"The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses," Pa told her. "I never saw a heavier-built muskrats' house than that one."

Laura looked at it again. It was very solid and big. But the sun was blazing, burning on her shoulders through the faded, thin calico and the hot wind was blowing, and stronger than the damp mud smell of the slough was the ripening smell of grasses parching in the heat. Laura could hardly think of ice and snow and cruel cold.

"Pa, how can the muskrats know?" she asked.

"I don't know how they know," Pa said. "But they do. God tells them, I suppose."

"Then why doesn't got tell us?" Laura wanted to know.

"Because," said Pa, "we're not animals. We're humans, and, like it says in the Declaration of Independence, God created us free. That means we got to take care of ourselves."

Laura said faintly, "I thought God takes care of us."

"He does," Pa said, "as far as we do what's right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation."

How one manages to successfully trade their independence for a larger interdependence — without regular heads-up from God that a cold season is coming — is the great question of this novel. (Can we get a volunteer for someone to Xerox that and send it to Hank Paulson, please?) Still, that doesn't mean that Pa is caught out completely. He's a smart guy, and, after a cold snap kills all their ground crops, he is disquieted by the fact that geese flying away too high to shoot, then that all the animals have departed: "Every living thing that runs or swims is hidden away somewhere. I never saw country so empty and still." After the first blizzard, he and Laura see oxen standing patiently by haystacks, then realize their heads were frozen over with ice and snow. Pa has to break the ice to free the poor beasts — "Pa! Their own breath! Smothering them!" — and that cements it: "I don't like it," Pa said, slowly shaking his head. "I don't like the feel of this weather. There's something..." He could not say what he meant and he said again, "I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

But again, you don't really know the truth for sure until an Indian confirms it. Here's the one that wanders into the general store to tell the townspeople to batten down — a remarkably nice gesture, considering that many of his brethren have been forcibly marched off the land to clear it for the settlers in the first place:

He was a very old Indian. His brown face was carved in deep wrinkles and shriveled on the bones, but he stood tall and straight. His arms were folded under a gray blanket, holding it wrapped around him. His head was shaved to a scalp-lock and an eagle's feather stood up from it. His eyes were bright and sharp. Behind him the sun was shining on the dustry street and an Indian pony stood their waiting.

"Heap big snow come," this Indian said.

The blanket slid on his shoulder and one naked brown arm came out. It moved in a wide sweep, to north, to west, to east, and gathered them all together and swirled.

"Heap big snow, big wind," he said.

"How long?" Pa asked him.

"Many moons," the Indian said. He held up four fingers, then three fingers. Seven fingers, seven months, blizzards for seven months.

They all looked at him and did not say anything.

"You white men," he said. "I tell-um you."

Paul! I know, I know! You TRIED!!!!!! (I think a scalp-lock might suit Krugman, actually.) But that cements it. Pa, and most of the settlers, move into town, where their houses are already completed — a remarkable move, considering that none of them have ever lived in town before, and reject the idea that it offers any protection at all. But, you know, that's where the houses are. The claim houses, where they've moved for progress and stability, have proved absolutely unable to handle trouble coming out of left field.

2. The Gummint

Since most of the settlers think this is a temporary move—one based only on the fact that the houses in town are complete and the houses out on the claim are not—no one is particularly perturbed (though you'd do well to whose regulations made it necessary to build the town houses before the homesteads in the first place). 'Manzo Wilder, who has come out to farm land, and his brother, Royal, who has come to open a store in De Smet, perfectly symbolize the new split. Royal is excited to take advantage of bringing Main Street to prairie, while Almanzo, who has to go through the government now to have a farm, has gone so far as to lie in order to get his claim, saying he's 21 when he's really only 19:

Almanzo looked at this way: the Government wanted this land settled; Uncle Sam would give a farm to any man who had the nerve and muscle to come out here and break the sod and stick to the job till it was done. But the politicians far away in Washington could not know the settlers so they must make rules to regulate them and one rule was that a homesteader must be twenty-one years old.

None of these rules worked as they were intended to.

Taking an even dimmer view of the taxman is our dear Mr. Edwards, who visits the family briefly in the midst of the worst part of the winter and refuses their offer to stay, saying he'll be following the railroad until it stops:

"I'm aiming to go far West this spring," he said. "This here country, it's too settled-up for me. The politicians are swarming in already, and ma'am if there's any worse pest than grasshoppers it surely is politicians. Why, they'll tax the lining out'n a man's pockets to keep up these here county-seat towns! I don't see nary use for a county, nohow. We all got along happy and content without 'em....I don't aim to pay taxes."

Mr. Edwards is the kind of small-government proponent you'd like to believe existed — since he depends not on the market but on his own grit to get him through, and thus has a point about the taxes. (If he dressed a moose, it wouldn't be for a photo op.) He is also an active participant in the trickle-down economics you could get behind, dropping a twenty dollar bill into the blind Mary's lap before departing, so the family can't refuse it. Still, trickle-down economics is no substitution for the real thing. Which brings us to...

3. The Railroads

Of course, as the snows continue coming, the trains cease coming — the owners back East deciding that it's risky, expensive and well-nigh impossible to bring resources to the settlers — who, having swapped their own farms for rinky-dink claims, now actually depend on them. This creates an uneasy tension, as the Ingalls stolidly try to get along as they always have, not quite willing to admit that in their situation, they're not only dependent on the decisions of the railroad monopolies and the government regulators, but on their competence — and, finally, largesse:

"'There's no more salt pork in town," Pa says, bemused. "Getting all our supplies from the East, this way, we run a little short when trains don't get through."' Ma complains of the same: "If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl, before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." Totally jailed in the house, kept in by endless blizzards and high drifts, Laura raises a lone, plaintive call at the preposterousness of their situation:

"What good is it to be in town?" Laura said. "We're just as much by ourselves as if there wasn't any town."

"I hope you don't expect to depend on anyone else, Laura." Ma was shocked. "A body can't do that."

Unfortunately, that's exactly what they do have to do now. Running out of wheat, potatoes and grain entirely, Pa finally goes over to 'Manzo's place, where — no fool he — he has divined that the young farmer has hidden his seed crop behind a false wall. "Say, that's my seed wheat; and I'm not selling it!" Almanzo yells, and Pa, once a proud, independent farmer, grimly replies, "We're out of wheat at my house and I am buying some."


But Almanzo, who also understands the effect the railroad has on the town's economy, already took the precaution of building the wall because he knew exactly what it would mean if the railroads stopped running:

...this storm'll hold up the train till after Christmas at best."

"Maybe not, but I know you, Roy. You're not a farmer, you're a storekeeper. A fellow comes in here and says, "What's the price of your wheat?" You'll say, "I'm sold out of wheat." He says, "What's that in those sacks? You tell him, "That's not my wheat, it's 'Manzo's. So the fellow says, "What'll you boys sell it for?" And don't try to tell me you'll say, "We won't sell it. No, sirree, Roy, you're storekeeper. You'll say to him, "What'll you give?"

"Well, maybe I would," Royal admitted. "What's the harm in that?"

"The harm is that they'll bid up prices sky-high before a train gets through. I'll be out hauling hay or somewhere and you'll figure that I wouldn't refuse such a price, or you'll think you know better than I do what's for my best interests...I'm nailing up my seed wheat so noboddy'll see it...and it'll be right here when seedtime comes."

Royal's a market man — his view is that the seed is worth what it's worth now, and if he did sell off 'Manzo's seed crop to a demanding public, he would be making a good deal for his little brother. But 'Manzo has faith in the actual worth of its seed and its capacity, literally, for growth. It doesn't matter how much money he could get out of his seed as a commodity — what if he could never buy the seed back? Home isn't about the market's determination of worth — it's about the worth of what the home can actually produce, absent a boom or a bust: "His homestead would depend on his having that seed wheat to sow. He would not sell it for any money. It was seed that made crops. You could not sow silver dollars."

4. The Free Market

I find it the book's greatest irony that 'Manzo, since he doesn't want to sell his own seed wheat, actually sets off, with Cap Garland (who always seemed TOTALLY hot to me with his glittering eyes and temper) on a wild-goose chase to find some settler who may or may not exist out on the prairie (Russia?) to sell him his seed wheat, since he's divined from Mr. Ingalls's act that many townspeople are either starving, or soon will. The lonely homesteader, who, like 'Manzo, also wants to keep the fruits of his labors ("I like to killed myself breaking 40 acres last summer") gets decimated by 'Manzo's devasting blast of fearmongering, self-righteous morality and good common sense:

"There's women and children that haven't had a square meal since before Christmas," Almanzo put it to him. "They got to get something to eat or they'll starve to death before spring."

"That's not my lookout," said Mr. Anderson. "Nobody's responsible for folks that haven't got enough forethought to take care of themselves."

"Nobody thinks you are," Almanzo retorted. "And nobody's asking you to give them anything. We'll pay you the full elevator price of eight-two cents a bushel, and save you hauling it to town in the bargain."

"I've got no wheat to sell," Mr. Anderson answered, and Almanzo knew he meant what he said.

Cap asked him reasonably, "Well, for that matter, how do you know you'll make a crop?"

"The only thing you're sure of is cash in your pocket," said Almanzo.

And yet, this isn't true either, exactly — since when 'Manzo and Cap return home and hand the wheat over the the man who's paying, the storekeeper Mr. Loftus, he then raises the price to $3 a pound, until the townspeople remind him that if he holds them over a barrel when they have no other options, they'll be sure to remember when the railroad runs in the spring and they have more shopping options.

When I started this column, since this is a book about a long, cold season, I thought I'd be mostly interested in amassing a bunch of Ma and Pa's standard Pollyanna admonishments for use in the days to come, as I slowly put aside my beloved Bluefly buys. ("Salt brings out the flavor of the potato! Don't be ungrateful for what you have, for you'll soon wish you had it! Let's make some delicious preserves from these green tomatoes the frost killed!") While if another bank closes I plan to return to these chapters for these and other enlivening materials immediately, I find I am much more interested in everything that goes on outside that house. I'd never noticed how much this book marks exactly where farmers, government, empire and industry truly did enter their unholy alliance, and the dangers involved therein — especially when you can't depend on small-government agitators to always drop you a twenty when you need it, or for libertarians to go off on a life-threatening goose chase to find someone else willing to sell you wheat if they don't feel like selling their own wheat at any price, and you're starving to death. Also, I don't know how to make green tomato preserves, or to preserve anything. But I do know this: you can't sow complex derivatives.

God, I hope that train gets here soon.

• • • • •

Bad news, my beauties — 'Fine' Lines too has been hit hard by the economic blizzard, and, like all non-essential items (I think of us as a tin of oysters, but butter works too), we are going to have a hard time getting through with all the train lines all snowed in this way. Which is to say, Anna and I are trying to clear the cuts but goddamn. Look out for us, just not necessarily on schedule.

In the meantime, may I suggest you try our archives?

I am pleased to remind you, however, that the book remains on, much like Ma's button lamp sucking up axel grease. If you'd like to be put on the mailing lists for announcements, denouncements and various and sundry informations, please click here or send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with COLD STORAGE in the subject line. You can also use the jezziefinelines@gmail.com email for any communications in the meantime; I love to hear from you!

The Long Winter [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [TheOldHag]

Earlier: Remember Me: After Birth, After Life
•Bridge To Terabithia: Troubling The Waters
•Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'Hangin' Out With Cici', Francine Pascal's 1977 story about life before the Wakefield Twins.

Getting to be thirteen turned out to be an absolute and complete bummer. I mean it. What a letdown. You wouldn't believe the years I wasted dreaming about how sensational everything was going to be once I was a teenager.

Spending time socializing with one's mother must rank up there with transcribing Haydn and laying brick as the activities your average 13-year-old is least likely to want to partake in. But Francine Pascal, best known for the Sweet Valley High series—you may have heard of it—manages in this most charming standalone novel to create the one situation wherein which bouncing around town with dear old Mom could reasonably compete with a hot date with Bruce Patman.

Victoria is a private-school student in New York, rebelling as hard as she can against her school's “vomity blue blazer,” and boxy pleated skirt and anything else that attempts to box her in. A humble ringleader, she modestly declines to take credit for the numerous disruptions swirling around her, even when authorities strenuously insist she take credit. Unfortunately, after a disruption involving a theater balcony, a cigarette, and a spitball directed at a teacher's head, the new principal himself declares that present herself at his office, with parental guardian at her side, to receive her just due.

For some time, Victoria and her mother have been locked in the kind of go-rounds that would bedevil a career. A typical one goes something like this:

Now she comes stumping toward my room, saying, “You just listen to me!” She's angry and just pushes the door open without even knocking. “You're behaving like a four-year-old.”

And we start our usual argument. “That's the way you treat me,” I say, and she tells me that's because I act like one and I should realize I was wrong and accept my punishment, and it goes on that way with me saying one thing and her saying another but never really answering me.... I swear I'll never treat my daughter the way they treat me. I'll really be able to understand her because I'll remember how awful it was for me.

But her latest infraction changes the stakes entirely. As it happens, the principal is suggesting not only that Victoria needs to be brought into line, but that she might draw the line somewhere else entirely. And as Victoria departs for one last weekend of freedom at her cousin's birthday party—a weekend during which she is busted for, as her aunt says, “smoking a pot,” only adding fuel to the ganja—she realizes her mother isn't only mad. She's about to give up on her.

But somewhere during the train ride home from Philadelphia something strange happens. The lights go off, Victoria bumps her head, and when she wakes up, the little old lady next to her has been replaced by a young, pregnant lady, all the passengers seem to have recently picked up a child or two, and the kindly, elderly conductor is now a kindly young conductor.

You may see what's coming, but Victoria doesn't yet—quite. Walking through a slightly unfamiliar looking Penn Station, trying to find her mother by the information booth that is strangely half the size it used to be, she decides first that they must be filming a movie, then that New York tourism has taken an odd direction:

You can tell they're really squares. All the women are wearing skirts and the men are dressed in baggy suits and most of them are wearing old fashioned felt hats. Not even the kids are wearing jeans. In fact, nobody is but me. It's unreal. This has got to be some kind of convention group from Missouri or someplace. Something real snappy like librarians, funeral directors, and Eagle Scouts.

She's relieved when she sees Cici, a girl her age whom she waves over, mistaking her for a friend. Cici is unperturbed, and then, after hearing her story, waits with Victoria, then finally invites her to come hang out with her Queens until Victoria can reach her mother, who she keeps trying to no avail. Getting on the E train, Victoria tells us, “...I can tell right off I'm really going to like Cici. You know how it is, sometimes you just meet someone and bang, you hit it off. Better than that, you're old friends instantly.”

Cici and I chatter away for the rest of the trip. We seem to have a million things in common. Especially problems. She tells me about how she's always getting into trouble for the littlest, most unimportant things. Just like me. Plus she hates the way she looks, too. I tell her she's crazy because she's really cute-looking, but she says her eyes are too small and close together and she thinks her knuckles are too big.

Victoria and Cici spend the afternoon together, partaking in wholesome activities like shoplifting and thwarting perverts in the movie theatre. But throughout, Victoria is finding it harder and harder to make excuses for why her number, apparently, doesn't exist in the New York area anymore, everyone is dressed like an extra from a black-and-white movie, and in Queens, apparently everything is sold for 1/8th of its usual Manhattan price.

Because the answer is...it's May 19th, 1944! No biggie. Staring incredulously at the day's paper, Victoria is filled with despair at realizing she's truly and irrevocably screwed: “This is definitely the forties and I have no home and no family and I'm going to be stuck here forever.”

But what...there's more! When Cici finally manages to drag the distraught Victoria home, she's shocked to hear a very familiar voice—and then absolutely gobsmacked to see the person that goes with it:

Sure, she's younger and slimmer and all that. But there's no question. I know for absolutely certain that she's my grandma. And this has to mean—no! I won't let the thought come an closer! It can't be!

YES!

Felicia! Cici! My own mother! Holy cow, I am I dumb. Fantastic! I told you she looked familiar. I mean, she didn't really, but there were things about her that reminded me of someone. Not so much the features, but more like the expressions, the way she talked—I don'tknow what, something, maybe the look in her eyes. I just knew I knew her all along, only I thought she was a friend of somebody's or some girl I met someplace. That's what threw me. I thought she was a kid like me.

But she's not. She's a woman. Felicia, Cici, whatever she wants to call herself, there's on thing for sure, this crazy nutty kid who isn't afraid to zonk a pervert in the shin, turn Woolworth's upside down, sneak cigarettes in a garage, and probably do a million other kooky things and maybe even some awful things like buying a science test, isn't my friend at all.

She's my mother!

Hangin' Out With Cici is a wonderful way to learn all about the 40s (where else would I have ever heard the phrase 'Kilroy Was Here'?) but it's also a great book for learning about what makes someone realize it's time to grow up. In Cici's case, it's finally being caught for a crime even she's ashamed of. But in Victoria' case, it's that, by realizing her mother is a person just like she is, she considers that she might want to start persecuting her for every conceivable crime. As she watches the young Cici scramble off a roof on her way to an ill-fated mission, she thinks:

Watching her now reminds me how once, about two years ago, we were on a picnic with two other families in some park on Staten Island, and I don't know why, but everybody (the adults anyway) was kidding around and daring each other to do all sorts of crazy things like swinging from monkey bars and climbing trees I remember that my mother climbed higher than anyone else, so high that I began to get a little worried. Everyone else thought it was hysterical, but it seemed kind of peculiar, even a little embarrassing to me. Now that I consider it, I guess it was kind of unfair of me to be embarrassed. After all, just because you've got children doesn't mean you're nothing but a mother. I'm hopeless when it comes to my mother. Everything about her is either embarrassing, irritating, or just plain confusing. I don't know why I can't just say she's a super climber and let it go at that.

By seeing her mother in her own place—that is, a lovely, charming girl on the verge of becoming a juvenile delinquent—Victoria is suddenly able to put herself in her grown-up mother's place, too. Suddenly, she realizes that it's not her mother that's been giving her a hard time. It's she who's been giving her mother a hard time. As the book ends, Victoria is returned back to the clog-wearing 70s with rock-hard evidence that her mother, however shrewish she seems now, once, really and truly did know how she felt. But Hangin' Out With Cici is isn't only really about getting to know your mother. It's about realizing your mother, that shrew, made a choice to grow up once, for a good reason—and you might want to think about it, too.

• • • • •

Well, well. My clever, clever girls. I guess they weren't wrong to give us the vote after all! Reading through all these correct responses, the first thing I notice is how powerful we are when we all work together! The next thing I notice is that only one person will receive any benefit from it! That's life! So, the answers to the Plotfinders, in order, were, as 987 of you pointed out, first Fade, by Robert Cormier (Nicole W. first by email), second Rabble Starkey by Lois Lowry (first commenter nevacaruso), and the third The Truth Trap by Frances Miller, first winner again Nicole W. The only one to get them all correct was Joan S., but since Nicole W. also had two correct and FIRST on each, she too gets a win, by a tweak to my calculus, which is mine, so I'll tweak it if I want. Go girls!

(Also related to you readers: my trusty IBM T-42, I trust, is on its last legs. Any recommendations for a nice, light travel computer? Teeny? Not a Mac, please. I know you guys love those Macs! But something even smaller. I don't really need it to do that much more than let me type things, buy things, and email with all of you lovelies. Many thanks for your advice.)

Hangin Out With Cici [Alibris]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Remember Me: After Birth, After Life
•Bridge To Terabithia: Troubling The Waters
•Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'Remember Me', the 1989 story of a murdered girl who will not take ghost for an answer.

Most people would probably call me a ghost. I am, after all, dead.

Okay guys — don't get mad at me — but I have to admit: I may not quite share your passion for Remember Me. Wait! Don't yell! I will blame it partly on the fact that I was recently rereading Richard Peck's Ghosts I Have Been, and find that Pike's work suffers in comparison, as his narrator's wry commentary is not delivered in a southern accent.

There is also the fact that the year this book was published, I was frantically filing college applications and too grieved and wraithlike to trifle with the actual undead. There is also the fact that I am very committed to the ambulating-in-the-afterlife scene in Ghost, and reluctant to switch my allegiance over. SO! Take some grain with your salt, if you will, and please do set me right in the comments. Just remember: there is enough afterlife to go around for everyone.

Certain novels seem to come built-in with a cinematic ideal, and I see Remember Me as something in the Lost Boys tradition, with a little Twin Peaks-cum-90210-by-way-of-Heathers perfectly-white-Keds action thrown in. Here we are, among some standard-issue group of teenagers in any post-Reagan-era California suburb, girls in polos with the collars turned up, white shorts, and that ubiquitous pageboy; boys in Members Only jackets and a modified flock-of-seagulls wedge, everyone speeding around the canyon from apartment complex to sprawling Spanish-Style mansion to leafy park. We could all simply settle in and enjoy the advent of compact disks and Kid n' Play if it weren't for one inconvenient detail: a girl has just gone, apparently without cause, flying off of a balcony to her death.

Or...HAS SHE?

Shari is a typical upper-middle-class teenager with typical upper-middle-class problems — how exactly to adjust to her new Ferarri and whether or not her boyfriend, Daniel, truly likes her or her car, how to deal with the fact that all the boys at school DO like Beth, who is obviously just a pair of breasts who's realized if she acts dumb, she'll be seen as an all-over beauty. (She's right.) She loves her colorblind, diabetic brother Jimmy — you're going to want to hold onto that information — and is happy to tolerate her parents, who, obviously, bought her the Ferarri. She's also fond of their housecleaner, Mrs. Parish, and likes Mrs. Parish's daughter Amanda too, despite the fact that she's extraordinarily beautiful, as well as a rival for Jimmy's attentions. And her best friend Jo is not only extremely fond of her, she's also petite, so they can wear each other's clothes.

Okay! Keep track of all those people and the things I said about them, please!

Unfortunately, Shari has been killed—and she has no idea why. The dastardly deed occurred at the house of Beth, at a party during which the well-endowed temptress fools around with Shari's boyfriend in the hot tub, but we don't know if it's related to that or not. But right before Beth dies, the kids have engaged in a seance (orchestrated by Jo — there's always that seance person!) during which Shari is sure she's contacted Peter, the recently deceased brother of Beth's boyfriend Jeff, for whom Shari has always carried a bit of a torch.

Keep track of that all too, please, it is important!

Poor Shari takes a dive shortly after wandering out on the balcony, her emotions in turmoil. She's hugely peeved at Daniel, discomfited by her strange possible channeling during the seance — but not, as she tells us from the hereafter, she's fairly sure, suicidal:

I felt a sensation. It was not one of being pushed; it was, rather, a feeling of rising up. Then of spinning....it was only in this last instant that I realized I had gone over the edge of th balcony. That I was falling headfirst into the ground.

I didn't feel the blow of the impact. But I do remember rolling over and looking up. Now there were millions of stars in the sky. Orange ones and green ones and blue ones. There were also red ones. Big fat red ones, whose number grew as I watched, blotting out all the others in the heavens until soon they were all that remined, part of a colossal wave of smothering hot wax.

I blacked out. I died.

What follows is fairly boilerplate for dramatic accounts of the recently deceased — but just because it's boilerplate doesn't mean it's not fun. Like most of the newly dead, Shari must learn from the response of those around her that she's passed over—or, rather, the lack of response. After waking up in her own house, she's perturbed that her parents don't see her, then mildly alarmed at their abrupt departure for the hospital, her mother choking out that it's important for the "three of them to be together right now." (Three?) Finally sees herself on a slab at the morgue, and she faces the unfaceable — and by that I mean, literally, her face: "It was me lying there. Just me."

And, like all newly dead, she also gets granted a spirit guide whose job it is to convince her to get the hell out of there. (Apparently the world runs like the kind of teeny overbooked restaurant that sticks the check on the table before you've even had time to order coffee.) She first sees him at her own funeral, in a casual ensemble that cracks her up: "His clothes made me laugh. He was wearing baggy white shorts and a red t-shirt and sandals. To my funeral?"

It is, of course, Peter, who, after schooling her on her need to go to the light, warily acknowledges that he hasn't himself because he's chosen to help others do so, though he's not completely forthcoming as to why. One thing he's certain about though is that Shari has to drop this notion of finding out why she's been killed and get on with her post-dive activities, pronto. He does this through a series of long, unqualified dialogues written in the style that I associate only with teen fiction of this era and Cormac McCarthy, and his perfectly flat responses are either highly ironic or deathly serious, depending on how much personality you want to ascribe to Peter:

Peter looked uncomfortable. "Shari, you're dead. You had a nice go of it on earth, but now it's time to move on."

..."But what about my family? They think I'm dead."

"You are dead," he said.

"Yes, I know. But they don't know what death means."

"That's not unusual."

"But it is unusual to have your family think you killed yourself when you didn't." I paused. "They must all think I was crazy."

"They don't," he said.

"They do. Did you see how many kids from school came to my funeral?" I sighed. "I bet you had ten times as many."

"Neither of us is running for student office."

"If I go into the light, can I still come—"

BEEZATCH, CAN STOP ASKING ME QUESTIONS AND COME TO THE AFTERLIFE, PLEASE!!!!!!!!! But, after accepting that Shari is not going to go before at least making a stab at figuring out why she's been consigned to enternity, Peter worms his way into my heart by training Shari to do all those after life-y things like floating and moving around with your mind — "Let's fly, Shari Poppins" — and also tells to watch out for the Shadow, a dark wraith that pops up and terrifies her when she's not paying attention. Peter also doesn't know what it is, but Shari's description is as good as any: "...perhaps, I thought, it was a scar on the world. It was painful to behold."

Throughout all this, Shari is fond of making jaunty asides to us that are, in fact, funny — although as I said above, I still think they could benefit from a southern accent. Wondering if she was considered superficial before her death, she finally dismisses the query: "I've discovered once you're dead, the only opinion that matters is your own." (See? Wouldn't you just want some Alabama in that?) After the second day she awakens, still dead, she sighs, "Apparently, dying was a condition one good night's sleep couldn't remedy."

Shari investigations, which she pursues both by merely settling down in rooms, invisible, and then invading dreams when she can, yield a bunch of information, but she's not able to shake it out to see who killed her. It's still interesting, though, to know that the Mrs. Parish, Amanda's mother, had an affair with Jo's father, her brother in law; that the detective on the case, Mr. Garrett, is a drunk and his daughter is a junkie; that Daniel lusted after and took a shower with his cousin Marsha; that Jo truly does love her; and that Amanda really does love her brother. But it's not until she's drawn to the site of her death and retakes her leap into the afterlife that she comes upon a crucial piece of information, picked up as her life passes before her eyes:

The baby was crying. The huge person was pulling on the poor thing's ankle band, too. I began to cry in sympathy. And then I cried in pain as the huge person began to put the other baby's ankle tape around my leg. It didn't quite fit; I must have had fatter ankles..When I awoke, another huge white person was carrying me through the air to see my mother....Then something very scary happened. The huge person gave me to another huge person not dressed in white and said she was my mother. But this huge person did not smell like my mother.

Thank god, a SWITCHED AT BIRTH. Now, if we could just get some—incest, you say?—why, yes, I think we can manage—

"Mr. Foulton is my father. Jo is my half-sister." I had to put a hand to my head. "Amanda is Jimmy's sister."

"That's insane," Peter said.

"No, it's logical," I said. "Mr. Foulton had an affair with Mrs. Parish, and she got pregnant with me. But Mrs. Foulton found out about it. Maybe they told her, I don't know. Mrs. Foulton was working as a nurse at the hospital where I was born. Imagine how she must have felt when she looked at her sister's child and knew it was her husband's child."

If I could follow that, I would feel bad too — but I did get it after a few minutes, although I must confess Detective Garrett's diagram of the apartment and the ways in which various people could have killed various other persons at various times stumped me completely, as it seems like some teen-based speed-round of clue. (DANIEL did it in the LIVING ROOM with the INAPPROPRIATE FONDLING.)

But Shari is smarter than I, and not only does she solve the crime, she saves her brother's life and finally decides she'll go the afterlife. But not before she brings Peter with her. As it happens, the Shadow, we learn, is all the bad thoughts and fears one has accumulated over one's lifetime, and Peter has a whopper: that he DID actually commit suicide. He's under the impression that means he never gets to go to the light, but Shari dismisses that with alacrity:

"You told you you have to stay?"

"Other guests in my predicament."

"Oh, yeah, go to the man on death row for advice about your trial."

I will try your patience yet a bit more with just a few mystery-stickler questions. I mean, would any diabetic eat cake, insulin or no insulin, end, period? Would a detective actually spend 10 minutes establishing the whereabouts of 6 people in a three-room apartment during a five-minute interval? Would he then ask one of those teenagers in private for a beer? Does Pike know those baby bracelets are made so that they cannot BE removed, except in the case of that neat TV movie where the nurse did it by mistake because they were, if I recall correctly, "So gol-danged slippery! I swear!" Could we think of a better name for the evil thing than "The Shadow," since only Madeleine L'Engle allowed to use that and yes-I-said-so? Isn't someone around there going to start channeling an artist or mathematician and go screaming down the dark hall before the whole place burns to the ground, for God's sake, ANYONE?

That said, I must return to my Lost Boys vibe. I admit it, ladies, and string me up if you must — I think the law firm of Duncan, Peck, Cormier and L'Engle has stolen my shelf for teen thrillers forever. HOWEVER. Whenever whatever person who is optioning every single movie from the 80s for a remake decides that it's time to get some Keds and Spanish-style mansions on the big screen, I have my $13.95 ready.

• • • • •

Quelle deluge, mes belles! Anyway — you ALL knew this Plotfinder! Thank God. However, the knowingest of all of you was Kate T., who came in with "Silver" by Norma Fox Mazer like ZERO seconds after the column posted. Congrats, Kate! You can write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com for your CHOIX of ONE COLUMN. If I know it, I will do it.

Now, for this week's Plotfinders, which comes from readers Amanda G. and Aury W. I am doing three, because these are all so disturbing I literally want them OUT OF MY INBOX, so here goes:

Double whammy for you here. I did a lot of classroom-library miscellaneous-leftovers reading in my youth, so a lot of the books, bereft of famous author or recognizable genre, have slipped through the cracks in my mind. I'm thinking, first, of a book about a boy who is friends with a wealthy boy. The rich boy has a twin sister that the hero is attracted to, and he somehow becomes invisible and uses this power (with requisite guilt, of course) to spy on the girl. In doing so he discovers that the twins (surprise) are lovers. Apparently this was as much as my ten-year-old mind could handle, because I can't remember a thing after that. It might be Lois Duncan or her ilk—Christopher Pike?

Second is a book where a poor girl befriends a wealthy girl (Veronica? Victoria?)—maybe her mother is the rich girl's maid? The wealthy girl has a habit of biting her nails and her parents bribe her to stop by promising her nail polish. Somehow it evolves that the poor girl's mother is crazy in some way, which culminates in her being found naked at the river on Halloween, where some boys throw rocks at her—the ringleader being V.'s love interest. Also the boys have an incredibly mean nickname for the heroine, which may be the title, and has been on the tip of my tongue for at least the last five years. It's been torture, really—please help me get some closure!

After his parents die, a kid (maybe named Matt) and his deaf little sister run away from home. The little sister carries around a stuffed Snoopy. While Matt is out looking for work, the little sister gets murdered. The police suspect Matt. He lies and says he's 18, so he gets thrown into jail where he's raped. The next day, he admits he's only 15 or 16, so the head cop takes Matt home to stay with him until the trial. The cop is married to an artist.

At some point, Matt breaks his leg. The cop's baby daughter falls into the pool, so Matt jumps in to save her and ruins his cast.

Also, he asks if the artist is a witch, and the cop gets mad and threatens to send him back to prison.

And I think there's one point where the cop calls the sheriff of Matt's hometown, and the sheriff says Matt was once arrested for beating up a kid who was abusing a horse.

Gah!!!!!!!!! Let us get these shadows out of the way and enter the AFTERLIFE where we receive all the ANSWERS. Winner gets choice of free column. As always, you can send me the answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. To cut down on paperwork, this week's win will be chosen in a calculus calculated to make my life easier: if no one knows all three, I'll give THREE individual winners wins as if each were one separate discrete thinger. But if ANY READER knows TWO, that person takes THE WHOLE SHEBANG, irrespective of the time the answer is submitted. If there's more than one reader who knows two, then the first one to submit wins. Anyone who knows all three obviously trumps everybody. Good luck!

As I do EVERY WEEK, I now must take a moment to remind all thinking persons that a) Fine Lines is being transmogrified into a book of some sort and b) you can KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT IT if you take two seconds and send me an email to get on the mailing list. To do so, either click HERE or send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with WHERE IS THIS PURPORTED EMAIL YOU'RE SENDING, ALREADY? in the subject line. Don't worry, many are coming.

Interns, I am still reading applications and will be back to you soon!

Readers, next week's column is a surprise — I haven't yet decided, but I'll give you the month's roster then too.

As always, I am reachable for any reason by email at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Some people use it to ask for books. Some people use it to share memories. NO ONE USES IT to push anyone off a balcony. Let's keep it that way, shall we?

Remember Me [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Bridge To Terabithia: Troubling The Waters
•Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'A Ring of Endless Light', the 1980 Madeleine L'Engle novel about Vicky Austin, who needs a good (dolphin) slap on the ass.

Dolphins. Do I even need to write another word? Oh, I know I do, but...dolphins, I had to write it again! That's the whole reason I started this column—to write about dolphins! You dog/horse/wolf/rabbit/mouse/Cave Lion/alley cat girls, keep your creatures. I am sticking with the one that can race to the horizon and back in an instant, symbolizes the great timeless mystery and wisdom of the universe, and is psychic. Try that with a rabbit sometime.

In A Ring of Endless Light, Vicky Austin, seemingly the most ordinary of the triptych of L'Engle heroines that includes Meg Murray O'Keefe and, in later installations, Meg's daughter Poly, yet again reveals herself to have a tiger in the tank. Having left her the previous summer, camping across the country on her way to a year in New York (see The Young Unicorns for that story), we return to an older Vicky under sadder circumstances. Not only has her family gathered on Seven Bay Island because her grandfather dying of cancer, a dear family friend, Commander Rodney, has just been killed trying to rescue a drowning boy. What has always been a happy summer on the water has become, in true Virginia Woolf style, a slow march into the sea.

Luckily—it is summer, after all—L'Engle has seen fit to break up all this agony with a passel of love interests for Vicky, though all three boys are wrestling with their own boatmen as well. First up is the familiar Zachary Gray, Vicky's pale, raven-haired suitor from The Moon By Night, his ordinary old death wish now transmuted into a veritable buffet of funeral baked meats. He's still got his bum ticker and loves to race cars and fly prop planes too close to jetliners—but now, his mother has died and been cryogenically frozen, and, oh, yeah—he's just (unsuccessfully) tried to commit suicide, which is the real reason Commander Rodney, who managed to save Zach, but not himself, is dead.

No wonder, after he pull up in his hearse-like black station wagon, he wastes no time telling Vicky she's all that stands between him and chaos. ("You're reason where there isn't any reason. Reason to live—") Stick a pin in that for one second, Zach—because, in addition to this matter of your being responsible for the death of Commander Rodney, Leo Rodney, his son, is very much interested in Vicky!

Without realizing what I was doing, I put my arms around him. "Cry, Leo, don't hold it back, you need to cry—" I broke up because I was crying, too, for Commander Rodney, for my grandfather, who was dying slowly and gently, for a thousand porpoises who had been clubbed to death...

I held Leo and he held me and we rocked back and forth on the old elm trunk, weeping, and the salt wind brushed against the salt of our tears. And I discovered that there is something almost more intimate about crying that way with someone than there is about kissing...

The French may have figured out how sex can evoke death, but it took an American to realize that death can also evoke sex. Luckily for Zach, however, Vicky doesn't feels the same amount of wild chemistry with gentle Leo. Speaking of which, we come now to the figure of Adam Eddington, who's studying dolphins at the lab with Vicky's older brother, John.

Those of you who've read The Arm of the Starfish know well that Adam is currently grieving over the death of his former mentor and friend, Joshua Archer, and the role he may have played in that death—but in this novel Adam is also, for L'Engle, the lifeline between science and God, his experiments with dolphins leading him less down a rational path than one towards greater mysteries. When he asks Vicky for help, thinking, as a child (he thinks), she may communicate better with the wild dolphin, Basil, he's made friends with out at sea, he realizes that she's not a child—and that her poetical brain runs rings around his when it comes to communicating with them:

"Tell me what he feels like to you," Adam urged.

How can anybody describe the feel of a dolphin? "Something strange, alien," I murmured, "like touching a creature from a different planet—and yet completely familiar, too, as though I've always known what a dolphin feels like....."

Again I lifted my hand from the water, but I couldn't see anything, and this time when I stoped scratching, Basil dove down, his great fluke flicking so that again I was drenched in spray, and appeared far beyond us, leaping up in great and glorious arc before diving down again...

I was still treading water and feeling more exhilarated than I have ever felt in my life.

Yes, that's right, she gets to swim with dolphins. Contain your jealousy. (Actually, just save it for when she has psychic conversations with them.) But Vicky's summer is one of absurd juxtapositions and extremes—one moment quietly spent reading philosophy with her Grandfather by his bed, the next being taken to a spa and a classical music concert with Zachary, the next eating spaghetti with her family and discussing the nature of death and cellular regeneration, the next skinny-dipping with Leo. It's an overwhelming deluge of physical, philosophical and psychological stimulae, sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, one in which the dolphins prove a crucial link for Adam—and for her:

"It's just—it's just—there's death everywhere—Commander Rodney—and watching Grandfather, and now Ynid's baby for no reason—it's just everywhere..."

..."Are you afraid?" he asked softly..."Of what, Vicky?" He picked up another handful of sand, and started trickling it through his fingers. "Dying?" his voice wasn't loud, but the word seemed to explode into the night.

Unlike Zach, who is far too dangerous, and Leo, who is far too tame, Adam is capable of making Vicky feel strongly without maker her feel entirely out of control—or making her feel entirely unlike herself:

...I heard every word he said. And I think I understood. At the same time my entire body was conscious of the feel of his fingers stroking my hair. I wondered if he felt as strongly as I did.

At that moment there was a rip in the clouds and an island of star-sparkled sky appeared, its light so brilliant it seemed to reach down beyond the horizon and encircle the earth, a ring of pure and endless light.

I wasn't sure that Adam's words were very comforting. But his arm about me was. He made me feel very real, not replete with me at all, only real, and hopeful....And I knew that if Adam kissed me it was going to be different from Zachary, with all his experience, or Leo, with all his naivete.

Adam did not kiss me.

Yet I felt as close to him as though he had.

This is a far cry from Leo, whom she can grieve with but not kiss, or Zach, whom she can kiss, but not grieve with. But here again, we find that the dolphins have the answer for her. After the baby of the dolphins at the lab dies, she asks the wild dolphins (wouldn't you?) to explain the nature of death to her:

I thought of Ynid and her grief at her dead baby, and I asked Basil, Is Ynid's baby all right? (Is Commander Rodney all right? Is my grandfather all right? Am I? Is it all right?)

Basil pulled himself out of the water and a series of sounds came from him, singing sounds.

And what it reminded me of was Grandfather standing by Commander Rodney's open grave and saying those terrible words and then crying out, full of joy, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Like Vicky's minister grandfather, the dolphins advocate a unified theory of everything, one in which not only life and death are intertwined, but evil and good. But when Vicky, on the cusp of womanhood, tries to assert her new psychic powers with the dolphins with Adam to form their own unified theory, she is slapped back:

Without consciously realizing what I was doing, I turned my mind toward Adam. Do a cartwheel in the water, like Basil.

I held my breath.

Adam dove down. Up came his legs. Flip. Head and arms were out of the water. Just like Basil.

Adam, do you really think of me as nothing more than a child? I realize I'm naive and backward for my age in lots of ways, but I don't feel about you the way a child feels. I've never felt about anybody else the way I feel about you, touched in every part of me...Is it only my feelings? Doesn't it touch you at all?

He broke in, saying sharply, "Vicky, what are you doing?"

I could feel heat suffusing my face. "N—nothing."

Now he was shouting at me. "Don't do that!"

"Why? Why not?"

"Because—because—" He clamped his mouth shut. But he was telling without speaking. Because it's too intimate.

But I did it with the dolphins. Why was it all right with the dolphins?

And the answer came lapping gently into my mind like the water lapping about my body. Because this is how the dolphins are, all the time. They're able to live with this kind of intimacy and not be destroyed by it.

I have always loved the part of this book where Leo tells Vicky how his parents made love after his own grandfather's death as an "affirmation of life" (it's not creepy, I swear), and it seems to sum up the entire thesis of this book—that sex and death are intertwangled with joy, which is, as Vicky's grandfather puts it, "the infallible sense of God in the universe." Meg Murray may well get to be consumed by tilting planets and fandolae and the future of the universe, but Vicky is, in her own quiet way, touching on questions just as crucial, however young and awkward she is. Like Meg, Vicky is a conduit for discussing the big questions, but I have always felt that she alone is also a conduit for representing the overwhelming feelings of adolescence, especially for girls. As Adam puts it, "I simply did not expect that John Austin's kid sister would be thunder and lightning and electricity."

• • • • •

Hello, pretty ladies! Thank you for being so extraordinarily nice to my dear friend Laura Lippman last week! (Just fyi, my personal takeaway from the Gilbreth family has always been flaking whitewash, shingled hair, QWERTY, "Lincoln freed the slaves. All but one. All but one," and Davey Jones Locker, not necessarily in that order. Oh, and the scent of oranges in California! This could go on for hours.) If you have not already, please go check out Laura's Times' Magazine Sunday Serial of last week, which returns, I presume, yet again in this next one.

ADDITIONALLY AND FURTHERMORE...construction at YA Book Central continues APACE, and various announcements, including the TITLE AND COVER PEEKS, plus SPECIAL ACTION ITEMS, will be appearing as soon as the publisher authorizes it, i.e. soon. Want to know before everyone else? OBVIOUSLY. To sign up, click here or send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words DOLPHINS DO IT BETTER in the subject line, and I will put you on it!

Now, onto the last Plotfinder, which gave us a rare visual. I encourage all of you who haven't looked at it to give it a click and scroll down before proceeding.

LAST FACEFINDER VISUAL

Okay, good. (Guys, you are OBSESSED WITH Matt Dillon, but that is not Matt Dillon! BELIEVE ME, I KNOW MATT DILLON. Hair is right, though.) As I said last week, one of these I know for sure, the next I am 98%, and the third I just like to believe is true. Therefore, the winner is one Elissa P., who replied to the challenge:

1. Courtney Cox
2. Ethan Hawke
3. Alanis???? (I really want to believe this one)

I ALSO WANT TO BELIEVEEEEEEEEE!!!!! But yes, that is Courtney Cox, and, I am quite certain, Ethan Hawke. (You have to look at the eyes, or, rather, eye.) Is that or is that not a pre-nose job Alanis? Did Alanis have a nose job? God knows; either way, there's nothing ironic about that corsage. But! Elissa, please write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize of one free column demand. Previous winners, your columns are coming up in the order in which they were received — do not despair! I was saving them for the cold weather.

AND NOW TO THIS WEEK'S PLOTFINDER!!!!!!! Laboring mightily myself of late, I have taken pity upon this poor fellow laborer, Sarah, whose efforts, tho' verily admirable, have as of yet come to naught:

A Ring of Endless LightA Ring Of Endless Light [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Bridge To Terabithia: Troubling The Waters
•Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome back to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, guest writer and novelist Laura Lippman takes on two books, 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and 'Belles on their Toes', and — Sweetheart, get her rewrite! — unearths a major scoop.

We made quite a sight rolling along in the car, with the top down. As we passed through cities and villages, we caused a stir equaled only by a circus parade . . .

Whenever the crowds gathered at some intersection where we were stopped by traffic, the inevitable question came sooner or later.

“How do you feed all those kids, Mister?”

Dad would ponder for a minute. Then, rearing back so those on the outskirts could hear, he’d say as if had just thought it up:

“Well, they come cheaper by the dozen, you know.”

I was a reporter for twenty years, but I was never an “investigative” reporter. Although that modifier might seem redundant to civilians, it is a precise job description within a newsroom, one of the top positions, reserved for the cream. An investigative reporter needs to be dogged, capable of following extremely complicated paper trails, but also personable enough to woo sources. And in my particular workplace – The (Baltimore) Sun, 1989-2001 — it helped to have a penis. Oh, my female colleagues did some impressive work in that timeframe, yet I can’t recall one who was allowed to be a fulltime investigative reporter. But then, as our editors often helpfully explained, our newsroom was a meritocracy. It was so meretricious – um, I mean, meritorious — that it had one of the whitest newspaper staffs among metropolitan dailies, and this was in a city that was two-thirds African-American. But, as ever, I digress.

To be candid, even if I lived in a world where someone might get a job based solely on the fact that she has a uterus — just speaking hypothetically here, of course — I would never had made it as an investigative reporter. I’m not thick-skinned enough. I don’t enjoy making people mad at me. I left the city desk for features, then fled the newspaper for the freedom to make stuff up fulltime. So it is with some nervousness and trepidation that I take a stab at investigative journalism and announce my stunning discovery:

There were never a dozen Gilbreth children.

Or, to recast my lede in the self-important newspaper style beloved by my former employer: There were never a dozen Gilbreth children, Jezebel has learned.

To be sure, twelve children were born to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, two industrial engineers involved the field of motion study. But Mary, the second oldest, died from diptheria in 1912. The last of the Gilbreths, Jane, was born in 1922. Frank Gilbreth died in 1924. So there were, for precisely two years in Frank Gilbreth’s life, eleven children, max. Consequently, every story in Cheaper that turns on a “dozen” – and there are many — is patently false. In fact, Cheaper by the Dozen never even mentions Mary’s death, an omission made possible by the fact that it barely mentions Mary at all. Instead, her death is revealed in a footnote at the beginning of the sequel, Belles on Their Toes.

I feel rotten, telling you this, because I really love these books. Although, in re-reading them, I realized I prefer the sequel, and not just because it drops the dozen charade. Belles is a better book than its predecessor, in part, because it loses the problematic Frank Gilbreth, who may make some readers wonder where motion study ends and child abuse begins.

As depicted by two of his children — Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey — Frank Sr. is a benevolent dictator. Actually, he’s not that benevolent, although his kids appear to be crazy about him. He moves dinner discussion along by declaring that most topics are “not of general interest.” He teaches touch-typing while banging a pencil on the child-typist’s head hard enough to hurt. (“It’s meant to hurt,” he growls at the protesting daughter.) He doesn’t believe in illness and his good-sport progeny almost never see doctors except when another Gilbreth is arriving. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Gilbreth decides to use his children’s tonsillectomies as the basis for a motion-study film. I confess, I find this as funny as it is appalling.

As it turned out, Ernestine’s tonsils were recessed and bigger than the doctor expected. It was a little messy to get at them, and Mr. Coggin, the movie cameraman, was sick in the waste basket.

‘Don’t stop cranking,’ Dad shouted at him, ‘or your tonsils will be next. I’ll pull them out by the roots, myself. Crank, by jingo, crank.’”

So, to be fair, he’s kind of a dick to everyone!

Frank Gilbreth learned that he had a bad heart before his last two children were born and discussed with his wife the very real possibility that she would be widowed long before their brood had reached maturity.

“But I don’t think the doctors know what they’re talking about,” Dad said. [Of course not! The stupid doctors didn’t even know how inefficiently they were performing surgery until Frank Gilbreth showed them his home movies of tonsillectomies.]
Mother knew the answer Dad wanted.
‘I don’t see how twelve children would be much more trouble than ten,” she told him.

“Mother knew the answer Dad wanted.” Am I the only one whose heart plunges a little at that sentence? At any rate, this telepathic empathy seems to have been the signature gift of Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who had a psychology degree. (“Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman,” as her own wedding announcement explained.) Frank Sr. had first floated the dozen idea on their honeymoon, but she agreed readily. The single regret she voices is not insisting on hospital births until the deliver y of her last child. She stays ten days. Can you blame her?

The chapters about Frank Gilbreth’s death are truly moving, but Cheaper is ultimately more a series of set pieces than a cohesive story. There’s just no larger narrative arc, which is why Belles is a more satisfying read. The Gilbreths were in real financial straits when their father died. Okay, they still had a fulltime handyman and a place in Nantucket, but the younger children were on the verge of being dispersed to various relatives. Although she had been her husband’s business partner and co-author, Lillian Gilbreth had to work hard to persuade their clients to stay with her. In turn, her oldest children – Anne, Ernestine, Martha and Frank – took on enormous responsibilities within the household. Belles, like Godfather Part II, is that rare sequel that fulfills the original's promise. You can’t understand the whole story unless you read both.

There was a change in Mother after Dad died. A change in looks and a change in manners. Before her marriage, all Mother’s decisions had been made by her parents. After the marriage, the decisions were made by Dad. . . .

While Dad lived, Mother was afraid of fast driving, of airplanes, of walking alone at night. When there was lighting, she went in a dark closet and held her ears. When things went wrong at dinner, she sometimes burst into tears and had to leave the table. She made public speeches, but she dreaded them.

Now, suddenly, she wasn’t afraid any more, because there was nothing to be afraid of. Now nothing could ever upset her because the thing that mattered most had been upset. None of us ever saw her weep again.

Well, I can’t speak for Lillian Moller Gilbreth, but I am bawling my eyes out right now. Maybe it’s hormones, which, come to think of it, are another reason women just can’t do certain things.

Laura Lippman [Official Site]

Cheaper By The Dozen [Amazon]
Belles On Their Toes [Amazon]

Related Link: Laura Lippman In The Funny Pages [NY Times]

Earlier: The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess

All Fine Lines Posts [Jezebel]

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads Beverly Cleary's 1963 novel 'Sister of the Bride', in which Barbara McClane discovers she's more than just a member of the wedding.

Is it possible to write a feminist novel featuring a cunning lace jacket and the baking of many batches of Snickerdoodles? Giving it the old college try is Beverly Cleary, best known for the unsinkable Ramona Quimby, not her many novels of young love — though many of them put as profound a spin on adolescent girldom as Ramona does on a girl's childhood.

When we meet Barbara McClane, she is a junior in high school, a scant — in her optimistic view — two years behind her sister Rosemary, who's just announced she's marrying her college beau, Greg. Barbara, painfully stuck at home spatting with her younger brother Gordy, is at that mutable age where one's personality seems as up for debate as health care reform, and Rosemary — a chilly, eminently more sophisticated moon — is currently the tidal draw towards which Rosemary is pulled.

While Barbara toils along, hounded by the family Siamese, teased by her father, and seemingly only tolerated by her busy mother, Rosemary is newly slim, getting exposed to Plato and psychology, beloved by a former Air Force captain, and otherwise enjoying all the intellectual and emotional fruits available to a liberated woman of the early 1960s.

Barbara is desperate to be similarly liberated, but her own prospects for the future, school- and boy-wise seem dim. Not only are her grades endangering her future at Cal, her current swains are only the moody neighbor Tootie Bodger, a trombonist with a desperate crush on Barbara, and Bill Cunningham, who appears, dashingly, on his Vespa to flirt with Barbara and gobble up all the cookies, then departs before asking her out.

But when Rosemary announces her impending wedding, she pounces: "Maybe at last she had found what she wanted to do...get married in two years like Rosemary." If she can't live Rosemary's new, sophisticated life, she can at least, for one day, live her wedding.

As befits a dreamer casting about for a dream, Barbara's idea of a wedding is born from the bright pages of magazines she studies busily, involving flowing veils, handsome groomsmen, exquisite flowers, and other celebratory perks. In her world, a wedding is less an event than spiritual Kabuki, aesthetics and accoutrement reflecting the purity and poetry of true love.

But Rosemary, newly practical and modern, is irritatingly unwilling to invest in this fantasy. Her post-pillbox view of marriage involves a small wedding, a suit, brown towels, and, ideally, hand-thrown pottery. Engagement rings are "middle-class," presents mean she and Greg will be plagued by "things," and she's going to finish school, not drop out to be a better wife — because Greg thinks school will make her "a better wife and mother." Rosemary and Barbara's mother is bemused, their grandmother aghast, but Rosemary deeply crushed:

She's overdoing it all the way, thought Barbara. No pretty dishes, no pastel linens, that practical suit. The whole thing, from Barbara's point of view, was beginning to sound just plain dreary. If this went on, she and Greg would probably spend their honeymoon picketing something.

But if Rosemary's view of marriage leaves much to be desired, Barbara thinks the vision offered by her mother's generation is even worse. A member of a happy-housewife group called the Amys (Rosemary's college-educated verdict, much to the amusement of her parents, is that the Amys "don't use their minds"), Barbara's mother seems unduly concerned with the price of flowers and the length of the veil, practical matters Barbara thinks should be divorced from the altar's joys. When the Amys give Rosemary a shower complete with dishtowels, sequined oven-mitts and endless fish molds, Barbara lowers the boom: "There was no poetry in their soul. Just recipes."

But now Rosemary, who has finally accepted the idea of an engagement ring and veil, is starting to display a dismal household-drudge streak, too. She and Greg secure an apartment where they can exchange rent for being landlords, and Barbara, picturing a sleek, modern building or, alternately, charming old place crawling with plants, is dismayed about the actual digs: a gray, junky apartment with a taxi-yellow bathroom and a Murphy bed, in a building where Rosemary will be stuck lining the garbage cans with newspaper and cooking in the teeny kitchen. She thought the veil signified an acceptance of the frillier realm — but she is again brought down to earth. "And bragging about how she would clean those halls to pay the rent! What was the matter with her anyway? Had the poetry gone out of her soul, too?"

But the absolutely nadir occurs when Rosemary, who, in her new sophistication, is usually a dependable co-Snickerer at the Amys and her mother's generation, starts, appallingly to soften towards them:

"...but next semester I think I'll join the Dames."

"And what are the Dames?" demanded Barbara, beginning to undress.

"A club for wives of students," answered Rosemary.

"What do they do?" Barbara was always curious about university life.

"Oh—things like having someone talk on nutrition and how to get the most out of the food dollar," said Rosemary.

At least this was on a higher plane than the Amys, who were inclined to exchange cooky recipes. It was evidence that the Dames used their minds.

"And at the end of the semester there is a party," continued Rosemary with a mischievous smile. "That is when the girls who work while their husbands go to school are awarded their Ph.T. degree."

Barbara had heard of a Ph.D. degree, but never of a Ph.T. This was a new one. "What does that stand for?" she asked, pulling on her nightgown.

"Putting Hubby through," answered Rosemary, laughing.

Barbara groaned. "They sound every bit as bad as the Amys. Worse, even."

"Maybe," agreed Rosemary, "but they have fun." She thought a moment before she said, "And so do the Amys."

It's interesting, on the cusp of the feminist movement with its cowl-neck-sporting support groups, Cleary chose to offer a defense of the women's support groups that already did exist. Gazing with bemusement on the psychobabble-spouting co-eds in muumus who think women should use their minds but can't finish a dress, Cleary, through Barbara, emphasizes that the Amys are more than smug Hockey moms (whose hypocrisy I imagine Cleary would happily skewer, too):

There was actually a variety of women in the room—the Amy who wore leather sandals and wove her own skirts, another who was active in the League of Women Voters, the mother whose calm was never disturbed by her six children, a mother who wanted to write but could not find time, an Amy whose rough hands and deep tan were the results of hours spent in her hillside garden.

There might be something silly about sequin-trimmed oven mitts — but it's not clear it's any less silly than only wanting hand-thrown poetry and brown towels. Cleary's housewives, and Rosemary, aren't just housewives—Barbara's mother works, both for money and enjoyment, and if Rosemary rolls her hair, she rolls it while studying Plato. Even Barbara has to admit that the Amys, who take on the flowers, food and sewing needs of the wedding, have impressive and useful skills: "The Amys had many talents...Barbara and her mother were most grateful of all to the Amy who dropped in to admire the wedding presents, and watched Millie stolidly sewing her way through the sea-spray organza, and simply took the whole thing away from her and that morning had returned it, complete and pressed."

This may explain why, playing at wifely helpmeet, Barbara starts to chafe at Bill, who kills his chances with her when he has the audacity to blow past cookies and bring her a shirt to mend because she seems so "domestic":

She discovered she was tired of baking cookies for that—cooky hound. She was tired of trying to win him, and as for her daydreams about getting married someday, she found them so silly she was embarrassed even thinking about them. Imagine living in an apartment like Rosemary's with Bill Cunningham and washing his socks. Never, never, never!

Domesticity, Barbara is learning, isn't a coy blind thrown up to catch a man. It's a battery of practical skills — or, at a level that strains towards its own poetry, a dingy, fond expression of love:

Not everything about Rosemary's life was wrong. There was Greg. And marriage was not something out of the slick and colorful pages of a magazine. It was not just parties and new clothes and flowers and a wedding veil....It was a lot of other things, too, like love and trust and living within one's income and, in Rosemary and Greg's case, putting their educations ahead of their immediate comfort. Why, Rosemary was prepared to do all of this cheerfully, even gaily, and it had not even occurred to her that she was being brave or self-sacrificing. She was doing it because she loved Greg and had faith in his future.

And for the first time the thought came to Barbara that Greg was lucky to be marrying her sister.

By the end of the book, Barbara has happily tosses aside her bouquet dreams — as well as her desire to follow in Rosemary's footsteps. She's not going to pin her future on a hazy groomsman, she's going to figure out what kind of people she likes and what kind of person she is. And, as Barbara looks forward to figuring out if prefers Tootie to Bill and what courses she'd like to take at Cal, in its greatest irony, a cheery book about an early wedding becomes an argument for anything but.

• • • • •

But just because Beverly Clearly cleverly slipped her feminism in on the sly doesn't mean you don't have to fling off your undergarments and set them afire on occasion just to keep the powers that be fully alert. I mention today's NPR bra-burning story because SHELF PLEASURING fans may have pricked up their ears at the mention of one of the rabble-rousers, Alix Kate Shulman, whose MEMOIRS OF AN EX-PROM QUEEN is one of the more fun (explicitly) feminist novels ever written. It's replete with dirty losses of virginity in parking lots and sexy snorkeling, and I highly recommend. Thanks to whatever Amazon reader provided this cover scan:

On to the Plotfinder of two weeks ago. Strangely enough, NO ONE knew it, or everyone was too obsessed with incest to attend to it at that moment. Anyone who wants to take a crack at duck imprinting is MORE than welcome to go for it.

For this week, I thought we'd try a different kind of Plotfinder, one hatched by my 19 months of rummaging through the 9 trillion books that will appear in what I currently enjoy calling THE BOOK.

Welcome to FACEFINDER! What is Facefinder? Well In the old days, YA covers used to wend towards photographs or paintings OF photographs, a technique that has sadly been entirely obviated by Photoshop. Anyway, some of these cover models were child actors...and some went on to become FAMOUS PERSONAGES. Or at least, I think they did. I can assure you that the first of these covers IS actually the actor (she is one of those actresses who insists on being called actors) in question. The next, I am 90% sure is the person I think it is, and the third, I just like to believe is.

In any case, can you name these three? First person to get them all correct (i.e. agree with me) wins a column choice. As always, put your answer in the comments, or email them to me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com.

BEHOLD!

Now, for next month's reading. In the upcoming weeks, please look forward to:

Next Friday:

Belles on their Toes (guested by the beautiful and talented Laura Lippman)

The Friday after:

A Ring of Endless Light

and the next Friday....

And This is Laura!

Speaking of THE BOOK. Yes, the Book! Do you want to be the first to hear any announcements, goodies, info or planned devilment thereof? (-on? -in? -abouts?) Of course you do! Especially since I will be ANNOUNCING THE TITLE, AND SUBSCRIBERS WILL FIND OUT WHAT IT IS FIRST, IF I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO SET UP A MAILING LIST!

To get on the mailing list, you may click here to send an email to sign up (thanks to Erika V. for THE POP-UP CODE!] or simply send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words OBVIOUSLY I AM GOING TO KNOW FIRST in the subject line. I am sort of in love with this title and eager to share it with you, and I hope you will love it too.

I also need your help. (This is the longest afterward EVER; I apologize.) I am in need of hi-res scans for these two covers. Do you have them? Do you have a scanner that can do 360 dpi, too? You are the best. Please email them to me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com.

Do you have any other demands, desires or prognostications? Terrif! Simply email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to let me know. I cannot answer every email (marvelous intern candidates, you will hear from me soon!!!!!!), but trust that I use them ALL to subvert the dominant paradigm.

Sister Of The Bride [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Bridge To Terabithia: Troubling The Waters
•Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads Katherine Paterson's 1977 book 'Bridge to Terabithia', the story of Jess Aarons, the second-fastest runner in the fifth grade.

The life-changing friend is a standard trope of teen fiction, but rereading Bridge to Terabithia, it occurs to me that one does tire of the all-too-common morally bracing appearance of a Pollyanna (as in my beloved "An Old-Fashioned Girl," or, you know, "Pollyanna.") An outsider who is revolutionary purely because of her strangeness ("The Secret Garden," "Iggie's House") is a great variation, but I'm not sure I've ever seen before a character who manages to be both moral and strange outside Bridge to Terabithia's Leslie Burke — both wholly herself and wholly strange, and wholly a revelation to protaganist Jess Aaron.

Jess Aaron is a fifth-grader whose elbows are bumping up against both his own limitations and those of his outside life (insofar as a fifth-grader has an an external and internal life — but, you know, if anyone can make you understand how they do, it's Katherine Paterson). The oldest boy in a working-class family of four other girls, he's a budding artist, which goes over poorly with his trucker dad ("'What are they teaching in that damn school? Bunch of old ladies turning him into a—'"), as well as with the old ladies, in fact (“The devil of it was that none of his regular teachers ever liked his drawings. When they'd catch him scribbling, they'd screech about waste—wasted time, wasted paper, wasted ability.") His mother, overwhelmed with his sisters, is too busy to pay much attention to him, but Jess, who's asked to stand in as the man of the household when his father is gone to work in D.C., feels the loss of his father the most keenly:

Jess watched his dad stop the truck, lean over to unlatch the door, so May Belle could climb in. He turned away. Durn lucky kid. She could run after him and grab him and kiss him. It made Jess ache inside to watch his dad grab the little ones to his shoulder, or lean down and hug them. It seemed to him that he had been thought too big for that since the day he was born.

His new neighbor, the life-changing Leslie Burke, could not be more different. A transplant from D.C., child of noblesse oblige who've taken a house in rural Virginia because they're "reassessing their value structure", Leslie meets Jess in the meadow where he is practicing his running in anticipation of winning one of the lunchtime heats to make him the fastest runner in the school. Leslie's comment, very far from typical girlish admiration, is, like herself, both artless and unwittingly incisive:

“If you're so afraid of the cow, why don't you just climb the fence?”

As it happens, Jess is afraid — although he doesn't realize it until he sees his new schoolmate Leslie flout all of the conventions that have held him back heretofore. On her first day of school, Leslie , shows up in old tennis shoes and shorts, in stark contrast to all the country children in their faded best. A child of a world where pride would keep anyone from showing up that way in public unless they had to, Jess is embarrassed for her — but then finds himself defending her when she breaks yet another barrier — joining the boys in the race:

“Gary stopped walking and wheeled to face him. Fulcher glared first at Jess and then at Leslie Burke. “Next thing,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “next thing you're gonna want to let some girl run.”

Jess's face went hot. “Sure,” he said recklessly. “Why not?” He turned deliberately toward Leslie.

“Wanna run?” he asked.

....For a minute he thought Gary was going to sock him, and he stiffened. He mustn't let Fulcher suspect he was scared of a little belt in the mouth. But instead Gary broke into a trot and started bosses the threes into line for their heat....See, he told himself, you can stand up to a creep like Fulcher. No sweat.

Of course, Leslie then goes on to beat the pants off all of the boys in the school. It's not a particularly feminist moment, though: she is honestly confused when they refuse to accept her win, as they will refuse to accept every other aspect of her that doesn't fit in with their world. Beating them in running, they must understand, is only one of the examples in which Leslie is literally ahead —not due to her economic and cultural advantages, necessarily, but in how those freedoms have enabled her to be utterly herself, a privilege they don't share.

Jess, attempting to break boundaries himself, is bitterly disappointed to lose, but still differs from his peers in that he can see that Leslie's open embrace of life isn't something to be feared, but admired, recognizing his own desires to be authentically himself in her: “She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in autumn. So smooth. The word 'beautiful' came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up toward the house.”

And here is where Jess makes a willful change — a decision to no longer be bound by his distracted parents or by the teachers in the school, but to embrace the people in his life who seem to be interested in other aspects of him than in how well he's milking the cow: not only his "hippie, peacenik" music teacher, Mrs. Edmunds, with whom he's been in love for ages despite the scorn of the school for her and her hippie pants and makeup, but Leslie herself. This happens, appropriately enough, as they're singing "Free to Be You and Me" in class (and did you KNOW that those lyrics were by Bruce Hart of YA titan Bruce and Carol Hart fame, by the way?):

Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie's. He smiled at her. What the heck. There wasn't any reason he couldn't. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-belled sapsucker....He felt there in the teachers' room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.

And thus begins a friendship in which Jess finds a freedom to be himself he hasn't considered before, and Leslie finds a friend in the sea a school population with a knee-jerk scorn for girls who don't wear dresses, own TVs, or stand on the sidelines cheering during races. This friendship finds its apex in the imaginary world of Terabithia, an kingdom in the woods conceived by the visionary Leslie, reached only by a rope swinging across a river, located physically and philosophically just on the cusp of where Jess's fears begin:

There were parts of the woods that Jess did not like. Dark places where it was almost like being under water, but he didn't say so .... Jess agreed quickly, relieved there was no need to plunge deeper into the woods. He would take her there, of course, for he wasn't such a coward that he would mind a little exploring now and then further in amongst the ever-darkening columns of the tall pins. But as a regular thing, as a permanent place, this is where he would choose to be...

... there in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess's own fears and insuffiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.

As has often happened when I'm rereading the novels in the 1970s period, I'm struck by how the class distinctions are far more explicit than I noticed as a child. Take, for instance, the Burkes, whose world cannot be further than Jess's and those in the town, a world of milking, hard-earned dollars, canning, trucking, beating your children, then dressing up for church on Sunday:

Leslie's parents were young, with straight white teeth and lots of hair—both of them. Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn't get used to it.

Both of the Burkes were writers. Mrs. Burke wrote novels and, according to Leslie, was more famous than Mr. Burke, who wrote about politics. It was really something to see the shelf that had their books on it. Mrs. Burke was “Judith Hancock” on the cover, which thre you at first, but then if you looked on the back, there was her picture looking very young and serious. Mr. Burke was going back and forth to Washington to finish a book he was working on with someone else, but he had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his gaden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.

They didn't look like Jess's idea of rich, but even he could tell that the jeans they wore had not come off the counter at Newberry's. There was no TV at the Burkes', but there were mountains of records and a stereo set that looked like something off Star Trek. And although their car was small and dusty, it was Italian and looked expensive too.

They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which at first he thought was a square box made of string), or how to save timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.

But what's interesting to me now is how, especially after the tragedy of Leslie's death, Paterson refuses to judge either, despite the family's differences. (I think there must be a hint of the Patersons themselves in there.) Yes, the Burkes with their Italian car, their love of books and art and all that is beautiful and deeply thought, the Burkes who are not ashamed to paint their living room gold, are a revelation to Jess, but then, so is the kindness of his own parents in the face of Leslie's death— his mother making him pancakes and refusing to allow his sisters to torment him, and his father reassuring him, albeit roughly, that whatever his mean older sister says, Leslie didn't need to be baptized to be all right in the afterlife. ("Lord, boy, don't be a fool. God ain't gonna send any little girls to hell.")

One of the book's beautiful, delicate illustrations of Jess's father carrying him home (does ANY book besides this and "A Taste of Blackberries" have more weep-inducing artwork?) showcases the stability and love Jess doesn't realize he has at his own disposal at home, as well:

Leslie, who is unafraid of scuba-diving, who is not afraid of the dark woods, of the world of imagination, of striding out on the edge, distant and alone, does die because she's unafraid. But she's also given Jess life:

He thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing—a stupid, weird kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow field trying to act big—trying to hid a whole mob of foolish little fears running wild in his gut.

Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self—his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.

But Jess has also learned something very important — that Leslie was scared too. Rescuing his sister May Belle from the same river in which Leslie drowned, he forgives himself for not saving Leslie and for being too cowardly to be there for her the day she died.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed." He saw a flash of Leslie's eyes as she was going in to the girls' room to see Janice Avery. "Everybody gets scared."

After Leslie's death, the bridge Jess builds to cross the river into Terabithia isn't only to protect anyone else from falling into the river and drowning. It's to make the leap he's made — into a world of art, imagination, life beyond his small town — safe for anyone else who's afraid.

• • • • • •

Hello, Plotfindrelles! We are on hiatus this week. The answers to all of your burning questions and the opportunity to answer still more burning questions will return, retrospectively, next Friday, when we tackle Beverly Cleary's Sister of the Bride. Also: Christopher Pike. Remember Me. GOT IT GOT IT GOT IT; LOOK OUT FOR IT. Happy rereading!

Bridge To Terabithia [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Flowers In The Attic: He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother
•A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'Flowers In The Attic', the 1979 story of a brother and sister who keep it all in the family.

Truly, when I was very young, way back in the 'fifties, I believed all of life would be like one long and perfect summer day. After all, it did start out that way.

About a decade ago, bouncing around a seaside bookstore with my best friend, I ascertained with increasing horror that she had somehow managed to plow through the field of YA literature from the 19th through the 20th century without seeding any V.C. Andrews. "You have to read this!" I said, shaking Flowers in the Attic at her frantically, disturbing the other Eileen Fisher-clad patrons. "Uh-huh," she said, turning over some Alan Shapiro to read the back. "No, really!" I pressed. It is a testament to her forbearance that, after she passed on buying the book and I insisted on buying it FOR her, she suffered me enough to open it and read the first page. At which point she immediately ceased to respond to all communications until she had reached the last one.

What is it that makes V.C. Andrews, and particularly Flowers in the Attic, so compelling? The story of Cathy Dollenganger, nee Foxworth, and her siblings, Chris, Cory, and Carrie, Flowers in the Attic is the compelling story of a family's betrayal and heartbreak, love and revenge, apparently. (See above.) More precisely, it is the story of a blond, Dresden-doll family torn apart after the death of a father — and a mother who sacrifices her own children to get a massive inheritance she finds she loves more than her own flesh and blood.

WHY do I not have a successful career as a flap-copy writer? Anyway, when we meet the Dollenganger clan, they are in the waning days of their picture-perfect life. Cathy, at 12, is an aspiring ballerina, while Chris, her older brother, is a brainy know-it-all who delights in tormenting her. (More on that later.) The young twins, Carrie and Cory, are not that interesting. (They are twins, etc.) And the parents, Christopher and Corrine, are possessed of a shattering beauty as well as in icky, overarching sensuality:

Our father was perfect. He stood six feed two, weighed 180 pounds, and his hair was thick and flaxen blond, and waved just enough to be perfect; his eyes were cerulean blue and sparkled with laughter...

Yada yada yada, await the yick:

His booming greeting rang out as soon as he put down his suitcase and briefcase. "Come greet me with kisses if you love me!"

Somewhere near the front door, my brother and I would be hiding, and after he'd called out his greeting, we'd dash out from behind a chair or the sofa to crash into his wide open arms, which seized us up at once and held us close, and he warmed our lips with his kisses.

....Love was a word lavished about in our home. "Do you love me? — For I most certainly love you; did you miss me? — Are you glad I'm home? — Did you think about me when I was gone? Every night? Did you toss and turn and wish I were behind you, holding you close? For if you didn't, Corrine, I might want to die."

BEST argument for fathers having to work such long hours in a coal mine they come home and start drinking in front of the T.V. immediately EVER. But Corrine, the mother — Cathy's model for womanity — is no better. Without any employment other than maintaining her beauty, she shows Cathy precisely how a woman grooms herself to maintain a husband's interest:

On Fridays, Momma spent half the day in the beauty parlour having her hair shampooed and set and her fingernails polished, and then she'sd come home to take a long bath in perfumed-oil water. I'd perch in her dressing-room, and watch her emerge in a filmy negligee. She's sit at her dressing-table to meticulously apply make-up. And I, so eager to learn, drank in everything she did to turn herself from just a pretty woman into a creature so ravishingly beautiful she didn't look real. The most amazing part of this was our father thought she DIDN'T wear makeup! He believed she was naturally a striking beauty.

Lying whore betrayer! Seriously, she is. You'll see. Because, after her husband's untimely death, she is shortly going to lock her children in the attic of her parents' estate — "...my parents are rich! Not middle-class rich, or upper-class rich! but very, very rich! Filthy, unbelievably, sinfully rich!" Wait, what are they? — in order to wile her way back into her father's good graces, which she fell out of after marrying her half-uncle and presumably bearing their Devil's Issue. (I hate it when that happens!)

As Corrine brings the children to the enormous, grim estate, her stated plan to her four charges is as follows: they'll hang out for a few days until she prepares her father to meet them. Then they'll charm him with their blond perfection, he'll write them into the will, and everyone will be happy and blond. Or, she'll just charm him and he'll die, which is the preferred plan.

What they haven't banked on is the grandmother who greets them:

Her nose was an eagle's beak, her shoulders were wide, and her mouth was like a thin, crooked knife slash. Her dress, a grey taffeta, had a diamond brooch at the throat on a high, severe neckline. Nothing about her appeared soft or yielding; even her bosom looked like twin hills of concrete.

Not only does this modern Miss Minchin have a bad attitude, she seems to have a bad view of the children: namely, that they are Devil's spawn. As she leads them through a long list of do's and don'ts that includes always brushing one's teeth, never opening the blinds and staring at the Bible to try to absorb the "purity of the Lord and his ways," the children begin to cotton on to the fact that something is amiss: "Eight: if I ever catch boys and girls using the bathroom at the same time, I will quite relentlessly, and without mercy, peel the skin from your backs."

Okay first, who WANTS to use the bathroom with someone at the same time — to say nothing of using it with a BOY? But the senior Mrs. Foxworth will not be put off:

"They're only children," Momma flared back with unusual fire. 'Mother, you haven't changed one bit, have you? You still have a nasty, suspicious mind! Christopher and Cathy are innocent!"

"Innocent?" she snapped back, her mean look so sharp it could cut and draw blood. "That is exactly what your father and I always presumed about you and your half-uncle!"

Shnap! Finding out you're your own first cousin...I HATE it when that happens!

And thus begin a long series of days that stretch from two or three into, I don't know, FOUR YEARS, during which the children subsist on a daily diet of cold bacon, toast, jelly sandwiches, warm milk, and fried chicken; are almost forced to eat mice; make a paper garden in the attic and slowly grow thin and spindly along with the flowers they have placed in the wan sun. Corrine's response to this treatment is to continue to buy them more games and expensive clothing, and assure them that the father is about to die, and they are going to lose their investment if they rush things now: "Just have patience. Be understanding! And what fun you lose now, I'll make up to you later, a thousandfold!"

This is all very well, except for how being locked alone in a room for four years, cast as the de facto parents of the twins, Cathy and Chris begin to have a shaky sense of their own roles as well:

Now the twins ran to me with their small cuts and bruises, and the splinters garnered from the rotten wood in the attic. I carefully plucked them out with tweezers. Chris would apply the antiseptic, and the adhesive plaster they both loved. An injured small figner was enough to demand cuddly-baby thing, and lullabies sung as I tucked them into bed, and kissed their faces, and tickled where laughter had to be freed. Their thin little arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I was loved, very loved, and needed.

I have always wondered if Andrews' continued use of the passive voice is what creates such an urgent air of mystery around her characters, as if whatever agents of activity afoot, unspecified, might not belong to the agents in question but to the the grim finger of fate. And they are completely without any control over their circumstances — not over the grandfather who won't die, the grandmother who won't stop beating them, or the mother who is showing up increasingly less often.

Worst of all, however, is the problem arising that no one can control — Chris and Cathy's burgeoning sexuality:

I was coming alive, feeling things I hadn't felt before. Strange achings, longings. Wanting something, and not knowing what is was that woke m eup at night, pulsating, throbbing, excited, and knowing a man was there with me, doing something I wanted him to complete, and he never did...he never did....

Tell me about it, sister. But Cathy, who is the only child who is cynical enough to see that her mother has no intention of ever letting them out ("It was my way to turn over all that glittered and look for the tarnish") is unable to see her brother (sorry) coming:

We were not always modest in the bedroom, nor were we always fully dressed....none of us cared very much who saw what.

We should have cared.

We should have been careful.

....

"It would help if you weren't so near, so unavailable."

Okay, Cathy. Just, whatever you do, don't sleep with your brother. Don't sleep with your bro—

He yelled out something like, "You're mine, Cathy! Mine! You'll always be mine! No matter who comes into your future, you'll always belong to me! I'll make you mine...tonight....now!

I had the strong dancer's legs, he had the biceps and greater weight...and he had much more determination than I to use something hot, swollen and demanding, so much that it stole reasoning and sanity from him.

And I loved him. I wanted what he wanted — if he wanted it that much, right or wrong.

Somehow we wound up on that old mattress — that filthy, smelly stained mattress that must have known lovers long before this night. And that is where he took me, and forced in that swollen, rigid male sex part of him that had to be satisfied. It drove into my tight and resisting flesh which tore and bled.

Having personally written a book that takes place entirely in a few rooms of a palatial estate, I can confirm how impossible it is to attempt to maintain the reader's interest without lapsing into narrative Red Bulls like incest, beatings, poison, and disgusting lies. (My character had to be content with doing a lot of cleaning.) But the stifling scenes depicted in Flowers of the Attic — and all of Andrews — take soap opera to a new level. Cathy tells Chris:

Chris, soap opera people are like us — they seldom go outdoors. And when they do, we only hear about it, never see it. They loll about in living-rooms, bedrooms, sit in the kitches and sip coffee or stand up and drink Martinis — but never, never go outside before our eyes. And whenever something good happens, whenever they think they're finally going to be happy, some catastrophe comes along to dash their hopes.

But if a soap opera is opera in drag, V.C. Andrews is a drag queen, holding a scented hanky to her heaving bosom, standing in front of an Elvis preacher at a Las Vegas chapel on New Years Eve. No one ever turns — they spin around with their legs flashing through a thin negligee. There's face-cupping and bosom-clutching extraordinaire. Fists bleed. Bodies swell. Odors are left, things are returned tenfold! Innocent, Beave-like protestations — "I didn't mean to rape you, I swear to God!" "I just couldn't believe this fantastic tale of something he called 'nocturnal emissions!' — exist alongside cloying, too-close informations, glances at cleavage, sighs like, "Let me have all those swelling curves that men desire." If there were ever a book meant to be read aloud by Blanche Devereaux, this is it. Andrews writes like a non-native speaker who has done time in a jail where they only show 60s sitcoms and One Life to Live, and my small heart aches and blood runs from many small paper cuts as I read her, beating my small fists on the pages.

• • • • •

I was going to say welcome officially to the last column of the summer, but it looks like I have one more next week, which cheers me, since I have no idea what I've done the last three months, to say nothing of how they can be already PASSED. Anyway, I have a few announcements. A) AND FIRST AND FOREMOST, we have a TITLE FOR THE BOOK! I was going to announce it today, but I was worried it would overshadow Obama's VP text. Suffice it to say it will be coming up in a column soon. B) AND SECOND AND NEXTMOST, Fine Lines is looking for an intern who is interested in getting some publishing, marketing, publicity and editorial experience, i.e., doing boring things for me on an unpaid basis with an eye towards the glamorous life that surely approaches. Do you have a younger sister or brother or intern who might be interested? Are YOU a brother or sister who is interested? Terrific! Send me your resume and a cover letter with the words EVE HARRINGTON in the subject line. Competence valued above all.

Moving right along to last week's Plotfinder, which was muy muy difficile! However, we did have a few — and commenter Bookish Bohemian (in the comments) beat FORMER Plotfinder winner Andria A. (in the inbox!) by like TWELVE MINUTES to come in with the correct answer, which was Doris Orgel's A Certain Magic. I have asked the Serbs if they want to challenge the win and they have declined. Congrats, Ms. Bookish! It's always nice to live up to one's handle. Please email me your column request to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, and it will be redeemed.

For this week's Plotfinder, which comes in from Suzan L., and which I post as I prepare to depart for an east coast-y vacation town:

Some boy, possibly with dark hair, gets trapped, (left behind?) in the aftermath of a flood (hurricane?) on what I perceive to be an east coast-y sort of vacation town (Cape Cod? Nantucket?). After being left/trapped/abandoned/transported to an alternate universe/whatever he happens upon a (possibly more than one) baby duck whose mother has succumbed to the flood/hurricane/whatever and the baby duck imprints on him. At some point in the survival drama he eats hot dogs and a whole box of brownie mix just mixed up with water into a powerbar kinda paste. There is also an early scene (pre-event, possibly involving an unsavory, younger sibling) in the backseat of a station wagon. The cover may have been light green.

Note that MAY have, readers, and don't be locked into preconceptions. Mail your correct answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or put them in the comments. First correct answer wins a column request.

Have you heard? There is going to be a book borne of this column, bosom-heaving, face-cupping Devil Spawn!!! Would you like to know who sleeps together and who dies? Duh. If so, send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with DEVIL SPAWN!!! in the subject line, and I will put you on it. (Aspiring interns, helping me set up some kind of one-click feature to handle this will be first on the list.)

Book club members and people who want to be in the know!

Next week, we have:

Bridge to Terabithia

Followed by:

Sister of the Bride

Followed by....????

Suggestions for the next round of books welcome, as well as any notes of censure, praise or despair, to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I read them all, I bring them warm milk and fried chicken, and I make sure they never go to the bathroom together.

Flowers The Attic [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: A Little Princess: A Reversal Of Four Buns
• Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
• Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'A Little Princess', Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1905 story of Sara Crewe, who's both a princess and a pauper.

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfare.

There are very few works of modern literature that successfully manage to link the possession of a large fortune to an equally healthy moral compass — and fewer still that go ahead and make the correlation causative. Smoldering Mr. Darcy, whose just management of household wealth finally manages to earn the respect of Elizabeth Bennett (who then gets to live in that house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) is rare standout amidst craven strivers like Becky Sharp or the hapless Hulots, who handle money as skillfully as a greased hand negotiates an egg. It's unworthy moneygrubbers who esteem Darcy for his money. Wiser personages, from his housekeeper to his dearest friend, esteem him for his money management.

But in the wealthy, intensely bookwormish Sara Crewe, author Frances Hodgson Burnett — who earlier, we determined, had a rather poisonous view of the spoils of empire — creates a character whose goodness not only equals her good fortune, but brings her fortune itself. (And ermine!)

Sara, like The Secret Garden's Mary Lennox, is a young girl brought up in Colonial India, but unlike Mary, she's bright, inquisitive, and the daughter of a young, wealthy officer who adores her completely. (Her mother has been dead for many years.) As the novel commences, he's bringing her to London to enroll her in a fancy girls' school (run by the odious, aptly named Miss Minchin, about whom we could write several essays alone), and you will forgive me for disgressing immediately into the wardrobe her provides her for her entry into formal schooling:

There were velvet dressed trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solumn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.

Phew! Clothing porn, out of the way. At the school, Sara is distinguished from the other well-to-do girls not only by trouncing whatever finery they have with her epic wardrobe, private playroom and French maid, but by subtler characteristics — her strange, compelling looks, her love of books, her ability to speak French, her warm, empathetic nature, and most of all, by her strong sense of fancy, which is regarded at turns as charming, immature, eccentric, and, to her likable, slightly thick friend Emengarde, as simply miraculous:

"Yes," Sara answered. "...when I play I make up stories and tell them to myself...."

...Emengarde stopped short, staring, and quite losing her breath.

"You make up stories!" she gasped. "Can you do that—as well as speak French? Can you?"

Sara looked at her in simple surprise.

"Why, anyone can make up things," she said...Have you never pretended things?"

"No," said Ermengarde. "Never. I—tell me about it."

Sara's ability to tell stories doesn't only prove a powerful attraction to the other girls in the school, who love to gather around to hear her make things up by the fire. (Ah yes, that crackling, Colonial-India-financed grate!!!!!! Crumpets and tea and melted butter, oh my!) More important, musing on her own circumstances rather than smugly accepting them allows her to truly — which is to say, cynically — speculate that much of her good nature may result only from private financing:

Sara was praised for her quickness at her lessons, for her good manners, for her amiability to her fellow-pupils, for her generosity if she gave sixpence to a beggar out of her full little purse; the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person. But the clever little brain told her a great many sensible and true things about herself and her circumstances, and now and then she talked these things over to Ermengarde as time went on:

"Things happen to people by accident," she used to say. "A lot of nice accidents happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me anything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know"—looking quite serious—"how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I'm a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials."

OOOOOOOOOOO, WAS THAT A DARE? I think that was a dare!!!!! Poor child, she will need that imagination, and the ability to be rather dispassionate, in just a moment, for Sara is about to find out, in the midst of a lavish birthday party with "lace collars and silk stockings and handkerchiefs; there was a jewel-case containing a necklace and tiara which looked quite as if they were made of real diamonds"—ALMOST DONE—"there was a long sealskin and muff; there were ball dresses and walking dresses and visiting dresses;"—DID I MENTION THIS WAS FOR A DOLL?—"there were hats and tea-gowns and fans"....phew. Where was I? Ah, yes. The terrible news, which is that not only is Captain Crewe dead of brain fever in the jungle, but that his entire fortune is gone, invested a friend's diamond-mine venture that's gone smash.

Shockingly enough, this does not go over well with Miss Michin:

"Where is Sara Crewe?"

Miss Amelia was bewildered.

"Sara!" she stammered. "Why, she's with the children in your room, of course."

"Has she a black frock in her sumptuous wardrobe?"—in bitter irony.

"A black frock?" Miss Amelia stammered again. "A black one?"

"She has frocks of every other color. Has she a black one?"

Miss Amelia began to turn pale.

"No—ye-es!" she said. "But it is too short for her. She has only the black velvet, and she has outgrown it."

"Go ahead and tell her to take off that preposterous pink silk gauze, and put the black one on, whether it is too short or not. She has done with finery!"

Then Miss Amelia began to wring her fat hands and cry.

"Oh, sister!" she sniffed. "Oh, sister! What can have happened?"

Miss Minchin wasted no words.

"Captain Crewe is dead," she said. "He has died without a penny. That spoiled, pampered, fanciful child is left a pauper on my hands."

So the same girl who, only weeks earlier, befriended the downtrodden, housemaid Becky by telling her, "...we are just the same—I am only a little girl like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!" now finds that she totally has to eat those words. While Miss Minchin does not quite reduce Sara to the Becky's level of wretchedness (Minchin's earlier verdict: "Becky is the scullery-maid. Scullery-maids—er—are not little girls") she puts Sara to work immediately, banishing her to live in the attic along with Becky, where she listens to rats scurry by night and by day, tutors the children in French, runs horrible errands, and is generally plagued by anyone with the authority to plague her.

Still, Sara has finds that her ability to imagine, which gave her the ability to be compassionate to people like Becky in her flush days, now gives her the ability to muddle through. Looking around her bare quarters ("It's a good place to imagine in," she laughs bitterly), she does a quick Changing Rooms:

"You see," she said, "there could be a thick, soft blue Indian rug on the floor; and in that corner there could be a soft little sofa, with cushions to curl up on; and just over it could be a shelf full of books so that one could reach them easily; and there could be a fur rug before the fire, and hangins on the wall to cover up the whitewash, and pictures. They would have to be little ones, but they could be beautiful; and there could be a lamp with a deep rose-colored shade; and a table in the middle, with things to have tea with; and a little fat copper kettle singing on the hob; and the bed could be quite different. It could be made soft and covered with a lovely silk coverlet. It could be beautiful. And perhaps we could coax the sparrows until we made such friends with them that they would come and peck at the window and ask to be let in."

You said...a rose-colored lamp? Hold that thought Sara also engineers other flights of fancy to make her life bearable, like that she and Becky are in the Bastille or that she's a soldier who must tramp through mud on her way to pick up meat for the cook. But the one that sticks the most is a fancy she's always had—that she's a princess. Not the kind who lives among riches in a tower, but the kind whose quiet, polite bearing gives her power even when she's reduced, like in the classic fairy tale, to horrid circumstances. Knowing she's secretly a princess allows Sara to stand all of the abuse heaped on her by Miss Minchin and the other household, who seem determined to grind her face in her fall from wealth as much as they can. In fact, her imagination comes to mean life or death — because for the one brief moment she drops the charade that her doll, Emily, is her friend — one of her oldest and best games — she loses her faith entirely:

"I can't bear this," said the poor child, trembling. "I know I shall die. I'm cold; I'm wet; I'm starving to death. I've walked a thousand miles today, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night. And because I could not find that last thing the cook sent me for, they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud. I'm covered with mud now. And they laughed. Do you hear?"

"You are nothing but a doll!" she cried; "nothing but a doll-doll-doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could make you feel. You are a doll!"

But luckily, in a stroke up luck, a man from India, very wealthy, and very ill, moves in next door, and Sarah is swept up in another tide of "supposing" about the mysterious gentleman that distracts her entirely from her rough circumstances, and reminds her again of how bizarrely her life has altered from the days when she herself was salaamed. Fueled by a rooftop friendship with the Indian man's attendant and his monkey, she is able to continue to imagine herself out of misery. In one of my favorite, most bun-like scenes in literature, Sarah trudges through the winter night, aching with hunger, and finds and four-pence. Though she's starving herself, she stands by the princess code:

"Suppose I had dry clothes on," she thought. "Suppose I had good shoes and a long thick coat and merino stockings and a whole umbrella. And suppose—suppose—just when I was near a baker's where they sold hot buns, I should find sixpence—which belonged to nobody. Suppose, if I did, I should go into the shop buy six of the hottest buns and eat them all without stopping."

....it was actually a piece of silver—a tiny piece trodden upon by many feet, but still with spirit enough left to shine a little. Not quite a sixpence, but the next thing to it—a four-penny piece.

....and then if you believe me, she looked straight at the shop directly facing her. And it was a baker's shop, and a cheerful, stout, motherly woman with rosy cheeks was putting into the window a tray of delicious newly baked hot buns, fresh from the oven—large, plump shiny buns, with currants in them.

Sigh! Okay:

..."If I'm a princess," she was saying—"if I'm a princess—when they were poor and driven from their thrones—they always shared—with the populace—if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves. They always shared. Buns are a penny each. If it had been sixpence I could have eaten six....."

...See," she said, putting the bun in the ragged lap, "this is nice and hot. Eat it, and you will not feel so hungry."

The child started and stared up at her, as if such sudden, amazing good luck almost frightened her; then she snatched up the bun and began to cram it into her mouth with great wolfish bites.

"Oh, my! Oh, my!" Sara heard her say hoarsely, in wild delight. "Oh, my!"

Sara took out three more buns and put them down.

The sound in the hoarse, ravenous voice was awful.

"She is hungrier than I am," she said to herself. "She's starving." But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun. "I'm not starving," she said—and she put down the fifth.

This small act — as readers know — changes the course of that girl's life entirely. But it hasn't wrought the titanic change because Sara has been good. Giving away the buns IS good, of course, but Sarah has only been able to do it for two reasons. First, her imagination has allowed her spirits up, which keep her heart open to others. Second, her imagination allows her to envision the circumstances of others — to feel them so strongly that she knows, even though she is wild with hunger, that the girl is starving.

I've always disliked the title of this book, because it seems to evoke a girl swatched in cloying, mincing pink, as far from the intense, intelligent Sara as one can be. Princesses in fairy tales are saved from drudgery because of something "princessy" in their essential natures that is revealed as their birthright, but Sara acting like a polite princess changes little in those who would seek to destroy her. (Obviously, it completely enrages Miss Michin beyond belief.)

And that's because being a princess is really only a vehicle for Sara. Although Miss Minchin thinks she puts on airs, Sara is not of the belief that she's inherently better than anyone else. Even if she was, what matters is that she's just able to imagine better than anyone else — which, in turn, makes her a better person. When a rat skitters out into her attic room, she doesn't kill it — she understands it: "I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat," she mused. "Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out, 'Oh, a horrid rat!' I shouldn't like people to scream and jump and say, 'Oh, a horrid Sara!'..." The rat becomes her friend, and her imagination gives her power over others as well — not only to keep Miss Minchin at bay, but to be kind to others, and to make friends — the friends who eventually lead her to her new guardian, thus restoring her good fortune and her fortunes. So, are we the products of our circumstances or do our circumstances determine who we are? Do I look like a cognitive-behavioral therapist? What I care about is that holding a glass slipper in our hearts isn't the way to save ourselves. Telling stories is.

• • • • •

Hi, pretty girls! Well, last week's Plotfinder was dispatched with great dispatch by all of you, but with MOST dispatch by one Jaime B. into my inbox at exactly 4:04 p.m., with the correct answer of Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry, and WHY haven't I done any Lowry yet? What is wrong with me. She goes in the next cycle after this one!

Jaime, please write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your gift of ONE COLUMN DEMAND.

Can you believe the summer is almost over? I'm dying. Anyway, this week's Plotfinder, from reader Molly E., has so many jarring details it's the only thing that has of yet successfully distracted me briefly from the gale-force winds of time's passage:

There's a book about an American girl who is visiting England with her family, but she is somehow connected to another girl in the past, maybe it's her grandmother or great aunt as a girl, or maybe it was her nanny who told her stories, who was German or Austrian, but went to live with an English family. I think the girl in the present had been given, or had inherited, or had found, an emerald ring belonging to the girl from the past, and maybe her diary as well. There was a story about Satan/Lucifer falling out of Heaven and losing the jewel from his forehead, and that was where the emerald in the ring came from. Both girls came to believe that the ring gave them the power to make things happen, but this turned out to be terrifying for them rather than fun. I think one or both of them spent a tortured, sleepless night thinking she had killed someone with her power. The boy and girl in the English family the German girl lived with teased her and said she ate "noodle strudel". They had a doll that looked like an African prince. The doll was called "Nirob", which is Robin spelled backwards. The American girl gave a pound to a street musician, and her parents said "Do you have any idea how much money that was?" and she said "Yes, it was exactly..." (I don't remember exactly how much it was, but it was a little over $2.00. This was my first inkling that there was such a thing as an exchange rate.)

The doll was called Nirob, which is Robin spelled...see, it's not TWO MINUTES from being September at all!

As always, send your answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or leave your answers in the comments. First correct answer wins one column request.

Okay. Guess what? There is going to be a BOOK RELATED TO WHAT OCCURS IN THIS COLUMN. Would you like to know about fun things that relate to it, online, in-book and on-the-scene? Of course you do! If so, please send an email with the words HOT INFORMATIONAL BUNS in the subject line to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, and I will put you on it! (Related: I am trying to figure out how to do one of those one-click things that can help you sign up with more ease and alacrity, and as soon as I negotiate WEP with my router, which is to say, shave 10 mental years off my age, I will get on it.)

Now, for the next cycle of books. As we descend into the last remnants of beach weather, get ready to READ....

Next week:

Flowers in the Attic

The week following:

Bridge to Terabithia

The next logical time I would be talking about:

Sister of the Bride

YAY I CANNOT WAIT!!!!!!!!

As always, send your additional comments, desires and prognostications to me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com, cuz I loves to hear from you. I will immediately invest all communiques in diamond mines.

A Little Princess [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Tiger Eyes: Cuando Los Lagartijos Corren
•Homecoming: A Dicey Prospect
Go Ask Alice: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase: Life's A Bitch And So Is The Governess
•Stranger With My Face: Stop Projecting
•Happy Endings Are All Alike: The Price Of Fault
•The Pigman: A Day No Friends Would Die
•Julie Of The Wolves: The Call Of The Wild
• Deenie: Brace Yourself
•A Wrinkle In Time: Quit Tesseracting Up
•Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die