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
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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:

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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):

#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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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.:

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 . . .

“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

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 Judy Blume's 'Tiger Eyes', the story of 15-year-old Davey, who has a new hole in her shoes....and in her life.

It is the morning of the funeral and I am tearing my room apart, trying to find the right kind of shoes to wear. But all I come up with are my Adidas, which have holes in the toes, and a pair of my flip-flops.

Long ago, in a writing workshop far, far away, I seem to remember a certain teacher informing his charges that one should make sure to tell the entire story in the first sentence. I can't imagine he was speaking of this book in particular, but Tiger Eyes is a shining example of packing a major punch in under 30 words.

As the novel begins, Davey Wexler has just turned 15, and her father has just been killed — shot when two junkies held up the 7-Eleven he owns, which was filled with the beautiful drawings that were the last remnants of the artistic career he never pursued. Davey, her mother, and her younger brother Jason, are wholly shattered by his death — Davey most of all. After spending weeks in bed, not eating or washing her hair, she returns to the world of the living when school starts — then succumbs to a series of panic attacks that knock her out (literally) on a daily basis.

Into the breach step her Aunt Bitsy, her father's sister, and her Uncle Walter, who live in Los Alamos, where Walter works in the W (weapons) division at the famed Lab that developed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I thank this book for all Trivial Pursuit tournament "Fat Man and Little Boy!" wins.) After the doctor recommends a change of scene for Davey, the family relocates to Los Alamos for an unspecified period, which lengthens into a year-long visit after the store at home is vandalized.

Bitsy, who gives tours at the Bradbury Science Museum where the remnants of the bomb reside, is the kind of woman who wears a uniform to work because, as she says, "it makes her feel official," while Walter is the kind of man who hands his niece a bomb-shelter card her first month in the house. The Kronicks, who allow Davey to ride their (clearly "Kronick" labeled) bikes only as long as she wears a helmet, have strict views on anything Davey wants to do: Climbing in canyons ("You could wind up a vegetable!"), riding in hot air balloons ("It's beautiful to watch, but only a fool would actually participate"), driving ("Why rush?"), skiing ("You don't want to wind up a vegetable, do you?"), the aforementioned bomb shelter ("Russians...have an outstanding civil defense program. If they're attacked, chances are, they'll survive. I wish I could say the same for us").

But Davey, who had been spending her nights in bed clutching a bread knife for protection and her days smacking her head against the ground each time she faints, has an odd reaction to the sudden onslaught of stability and security: she starts to become her old, adventurous self again, because, on some level, she realizes that her life has weathered its own enormous bomb without a shelter, and she's still here. After begging off yet another family sightseeing tour ("But we had rest and relaxation scheduled for next week!" Bitsy cries) she goes off on a bike ride, climbs down into a canyon, and meets...WOLF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!....the tanned, inscrutable fellow hiker who hears her shouting "Daddy" to the empty canyon and thinks she's shouting for help.

Davey, still on the alert for maniacs, is not happy to be caught out in such a vulnerable position:

"So...I'm alone," I say, sounding bitchier by the minute. "Is there a law against that?" I am standing in front of the rock now. All I have to do is bend over, pick it up, and wham....

"No, but there should be," he says.

"Oh yeah....why?" I am having trouble following our conversation but I know it is best to keep him talking. The longer he talks the less likely that he'll attack. I read that somewhere.

"Who's going to help you if you need it?" he asks me.

And with that, Davey remembers something important — which is that, while being alone with a stranger can make you vulnerable, so can just being alone. This realization is hastened along by her extreme thirst, which has reached epic proportions since her climb down into the canyon at midday with zero provisions:

"You're thirsty."

"A little," I tell him, licking my lips.

"You came into the canyon without a water bottle....Here...." he passes his to me. I am so relieved I feel like crying. I mean to take a quick swig, but once it's to my lips I can't stop. I drink and drink until he takes it from me.

"Easy," he says, "or you'll get sick."

I begin to relax. He's not out to get me after all.

"What's your name?" I ask him.

"You can call me Wolf."

"Is that a first name of a last name?"

"Either," he says.

"Oh." I can't think of anything else to say.

He stands, puts the water bottle back into his knapsack, stretches and says, "Okay, let's go."

"Go?" I should have let down my guard. "Where?"

"Back up," he says. "It's one o'clock. I've got an appointment at two."

"So, go," I tell him.

"You're going with me."

"Really!" I say.

"Yeah....really."

"Guess again," I say.

"I'm not about to leave you down here by yourself. I'm not in the mood to be called by Search and Rescue later. I have other things to do."

"Search and Rescue?"

"Right."

I think about the fourteen-year-old boy who was killed by a falling rock and about the woman who broke her leg and went into shock and I wonder if Wolf was called in then. But I don't ask him. Instead I say, "I'm tougher than I look."

"Sure you are. Let's go. I'm in a hurry."

"How do I know I can trust you?"

"You see anybody you can trust more?"

Life in Los Alamos is very different from Davey's life in Atlantic City, a brilliant mix of color and class on the edge of the ocean, where no one needs Search and Rescue anymore than they need proper boots to climb down into the canyon. By contrast, Los Alamos is flat and arid, rigidly divided along class lines that mimic those at the lab — meaning the kids whose parents are highest up are the grinds at school, any Hispanic kids are the offspring of the maintenance workers in the lab, and there are barely any black kids at all. (In Atlantic City, Davey's best friend, Lenaya, was black, and a budding scientist.) Davey, whose life with Walter puts her in the grind group but not of it, wishes that there were a group for people like her called "The Left-Overs."

But even as Davey starts to come back to life, the novel is bracketed by scenes from what happened the night her father died, each snapshot from the past appearing as Davey takes another stop forward into the present:

I walked behind the counter to where Dad was sitting at his easel and looked over his shoulder. "Very nice..." I said. "Especially the eyes. I wish I could draw like you."

"You can do other things."

"Oh yeah...like what?"

My father pretended to think that over. "You're very good at stacking the bread," he said.

"Thanks a lot!"

We both laughed. I hung my arms over his shoulders, from behind, and rested my face against his hair, which was soft and curly and smelled of salt water.

"So, where are you off to?" Dad asked.

"Oh, Hugh and I are going out."

"What time will you be back?"

"I'm not sure."

"An educated guess."

"Tell...eleven...something like that."

"Stay off the beach. It's not safe at night."

"I've already had that lecture."

"I just don't want you to get carried away and forget."

"I won't. I promise."

....Outside the sun was setting.

It's not only physical safety that her father is talking about — it's the fact that she was conceived under Atlantic City's Million Dollar Pier — her parents joke that she's their "Million Dollar Baby" — and that anything Davey gets up to with Hugh could conceivably derail her life as much as it did that of her parents. ("A waste of a life," Walter bitterly sneers one night about her father, ridiculing how his lack of planning put Davey and her family in its present circumstances.) But would planning ahead have done anything to help her father stay alive?

This is the question Davey asks after things have come to a boiling point with her and Walter and Bitsy. While Jason has taken on Bitsy and Walter's love of planning ahead (symbolized by the apron he wears while he and Bitsy make endless sheets of cookies) her mother has descended into a cocoon of pain medications, blotting out the entire world:

I face Mom and say, "Mom, please. I really want to take Drivers Ed. It's very important to me. All you have to do is sign the little green card."

Mom looks at me and we make eye contact for the first time in months. Then, just as she is about to speak, Walter says, "Statistics show that accidents, especially automobile accidents, are the leading cause of death among young people."

"Why go looking for trouble?" Bitsy says. She pours the batter into the cake pan and Jason pulls the oven door open for her.

"Mom...say something, will you?"

"Walter and Bitsy know what's best," Mom says.

"Since when...since when I'd like to know?...I'm sick of hearing how dangerous everything is...Dangerous...dangerous....dangerous....Stay out of the canyon, Davey...you could be hit by a falling rock. Don't forget your bicycle helmet, Davey...you could get hit by a car. No, you can't learn to ski, Davey....you might wind up a vegetable!" I am really yelling now.

"Davey, honey..." Mom begins and she reaches for me. But I pull away from her.

"Some people have lived up here so long they've forgotten what the real world is like," I shout. "and the idea of it scares the..."

"You can just stop it, right now," Walter says, before I have finished. He says it slowly, making every word count.

"You're a good one to talk," I tell him. "You're the one who's making the bombs. You're the one who's figuring out how to blow up the whole world. But you won't let me take Driver's Ed. A person can get killed crossing the street. A person can get killed minding his own store. Did you ever think of that?" I kick the wall and stomp out of the room. I am crying hard and my throat is sore.

Davey may realize that living as irresponsibly as her parents did wasn't the best idea, but she also is learning that if your whole life is built around trying to stave off death, taking up arms against unseen forces can make your life arid, a place where responsibility blots out possibility. ("I don't want to go through my life afraid, but I don't want to wind up like my father, either," Davey writes to Wolf. "...I think about that a lot, especially in this town, where so many people seem afraid. Does building bombs make them feel afraid...?")

Even after having re-gorged myself on YA Lit for the past year, Tiger Eyes remains my favorite book (except for "Jacob Have I Loved"!!!!!!!!) of all time, and I've been trying to figure out why. I know it has something to do with how many themes Blume managed to fit into the slim novel, and on how internal, adult and independent a level Davey's life is presented to us. (We get major flashbacks of the father's death, long conversations with Wolf in the canyon — but this must be the only teen novel in which the heroine stars in a production of Oklahoma! and the entirety is summed up in a paragraph.)

But I think it has something to do with the slow accrual of change, the fact that Davey comes from being too scared to sleep with anything but a bread knife to a girl who can face her father's death — not because of anything that has happened to her, but because of something that is in her.

After her mother refuses the proposal of a man at the Lab and decides to take the family home, Davey realizes this is true of her mother, too:

"It's time for us to leave," Mom says. "It's time for us to start making a life on our own. We're going home. We're going home to Atlantic City."

"No!" Bitsy says...."What about the children....They're secure here. You can't keep moving them around."

"I'm not going to," Mom says. "I'm taking them home."

"But Atlantic City...it's not safe...you, of all people, should realize that, Gwen."

"I can't let safety and security become the focus of my life," Mom says.

I can't believe how sure of herself my mother sounds. I want to stand up and cheer for her.

Everyone knows that if you worry about how how you'll die, you'll never enjoy being alive. But Davey learns something even more subtle: that although people think preparing for death is being responsible, it's also ducking a greater responsibility: one's responsibility to live.

Davey learns that herself the day she meets Wolf, and the day she starts to let her father go:

"Stop!" I tell myself. Stop thinking about that night. Concentrate on how good it feels to be alive. No matter what. Just to see the color of the sky, to smell the pine trees, to meet a stranger in the canyon.

I go to my room, tear a piece of paper from the yellow pad on my dressers and write one word. Alive. Then I tear off another piece and write Wolf.

Maybe the answer to the question lies in the shoes Davey finally settles on after teetering on her mother's borrowed heels at the funeral and then slipping down the into the canyon where she meets Wolf in her Adidas. She knows she'll never be the kind of person who is so afraid of what can happen to them they'll never go into the canyon at all, but she's also not ready to be like her parents were — stumbling and slipping down, then caught out without water or shelter when tragedy strikes. She's become the kind of person keeps around a pair of the hiking boots and canteen Wolf tells her to buy after escorting her out of the canyon when they first meet. They're sturdy, long-lasting, and strong, prepared to take on any situation — especially a walk into the unknown.

• • • • •

Hello my beauties! Once again, your ability to regard the vast, striated rock face of YA literature and zero in on the glittering fleck of the stratum in question amounds and astazes me. In this case, since the book was part of the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, we were a bit closer to the STRATUM than the FLECK in question ("Alice in Agony!" "Alice In-Between!" "One of the Alice Books!"), but who I am to judge? I am partial to the Witch series, myself. Thus, I am giving the prize to the first and most all-encompassing answer, which merely read:

ALICE. The Plotfinder is one of the Alice books!

It sure as hell is! Commenter Kelsium, please write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your column request. And if we have any audience members who, overcome by memories, happenstanced to reread the book(s) this past week and can confirm which one it is, you are very welcome.

ONWARD. This week's following Plotfinder request comes from reader Jane M., and has been chosen both for its own merits and in honor of all my Russian girlfriends/ex-boyfriends/favorite families being in Wall Street Journal/being on Boing Boing/moving to Russia (seriously!) this week:

Google and many supposedly well-versed and dedicated librarians have failed repeatedly in this one! It skews a little more towards the Basil E Frankwiler/ Egypt Game age range than the Sandra Scoppettone end. There are two siblings (brother and sister); the girl may or may not be named Louise. They live possibly in England or, if not, someplace cold and bleak and rainy, and it's about when their uncle comes to visit. It's set probably around the 1920s or 30s, because he tells them all about how wonderful Russia was before the revolution. He says it was like the whole country was filmed in Technicolor. Now it is gray and grim. When he leaves, he writes a note saying he is leaving something behind for them. The note ends"ya tebya lyublyu." The kids think this is code to find a treasure, which they decide is a Faberge egg which he brought from Russia. They search and search and try and try to crack the code. In the end, it turns out "ya tebya lyublyu" means "I love you" in Russian and there is no treasure ...

Sounds Soviet as hell to me! Please send all answers to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. First correct answer wins a column request.

Also. Did you know there's going to be a book? What are you, in Soviet Russia? THERE'S GOING TO BE A BOOK. Want to know about all developments related to it? (Actually, if all goes well, there will truly be some awesome developments. SOON!) Send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words I LOVE YOU TOO in the subject line, and I will put you on it.

As ever, send your column requests, smooth, polished stones and Candy Striper memories to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I will translate them all into Spanish, lacking the correct accent marks, poorly.

Encontramos en la proxima semana!

Tiger Eyes [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 Cynthia Voight's 'Homecoming', the 1981 story of a girl on a quest for fire.

The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car. "You be good," she said. "You hear me? You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you. You hear?"

Is there anything better than having to count out your every meal? I don't mean in real life — that's horrible of course — but stretching foodstuffs to match your difficult situation is, you might say — I do apologize — a staple of a certain brand of teen fiction. Take Julie (of the Wolves) and her dried seal meat rations. Take Claudia (of Mixed-Up Files) stretching the coins hard-earned by scraping the bottom of the Met's fountain to get her and Jamie a hearty breakfast at the Automat. Take A Little Princess's Sarah Crewe managing to pull together enough pence for four large, fragrant buns—then realizing she is not going to be able to enjoy them if that really poor street urchin keeps looking at her that way.

But one of my favorite food-counters of all time is 13-year-old Dicey Tillerman, whose mastery over milk, bananas, donuts, clams, and throwaway fish makes her no less an illustrious follower of this tradition.

When we meet up with Dicey, it's sometime (I extrapolate) around 1980, and Dicey, along with her younger siblings—smart, bookish brother James, gentle Maybeth, and rebellious Sammy—have been left in the parking lot of a mall in Peewauket, Massachusetts by their mother, with only the address of a distant relative in Bridgeport, Connecticut that the woman has pressed in Dicey's hand to go by.

Before I get into their adventure, I'm going to swing into the first meal at the mall before I get into the plot because I HAVE TO:

...They were drawn to restaurants that exuded the smell of spaghetti and pizza or fried chicken, bakeries with trays of golden doughnuts lined up behind glass windows, candy stories, where the countertop was crowded with large jars of jelly beans and sourballs and little foil-covered chocolates and peppermints dipped in crunch white frosting; cheese shops (they each had two free samples), where the rich smell of aged cheeses mingled with fresh-ground coffee, and hot dog stands, where they stood back in silent row. After this, they sat on a backless bench before the waterfall, tired and hungry. Altogether, they had eleven dollars and fifty cents, more than any one of them had at one time before, even Dicey, who contributed all of her baby-sitting money, seven dollars.

They spent almost four dollars on supper at the mall, and none of them had dessert. They had hamburgers and french fries and, after Dicey thought it over, milkshakes.

Ah, poor fools! It's a last meal in a very real sense, since this plasticine, industrial Agora and everything it represents is about to be left behind by the Tillermans, perforce—and Dicey will be thinking it over at every meal, from now on. After making a call to find out how expensive buses to Bridgeport are and almost being nabbed by a guard at the mall, Dicey decides they'll set off to walk to Bridgeport, to their Aunt Cilla, whom they've never met—because Dicey thinks there's a chance their mother will be there.

It's not completely clear why Dicey runs from the guard, instead of marching right up to him and telling him exactly what's happened. Partly it's dim understanding that doing so would mean they'd be split up, and certainly taken away from their mother and put into foster care. There's also the fact that, since the children were raised in a rambling shack in Provincetown, out of the mainstream, their father absent, their mother (almost certainly) bipolar, they're used to acting on their wits and whims, not on the say-so of adults. But mostly it's Dicey's pure instinct—something in her resists handing over their destiny to someone in authority who doesn't know them. It's her family. She's the authority, even if she doesn't quite know what she's going to do with it. “Sometimes I think we can do anything,” Dicey tells James, once they're on their way. “Because we're the Tillermans.”

So they set off, on foot, on Route 1, “mostly garages and small shopping centers and discount stores and quick food places. There were no green patches and few sidewalks.” James comments that it was probably a “nice road once, a country road," and soon, Dicey realizes they'll be better off sticking to actual country roads, where they can camp out and forage for their own food. So they begin a pattern—she'll buy them donuts, bread, apples and other cheap, filling things during the day, and then they'll stay in parks at night. Sometimes, they stay in abandoned houses in developments. She buys them hooks to fish, and Sammy (who is SIX—they built six-year-olds better then, obviously) actually proves to be a good fisherman. Maybeth is skilled at gathering wood and suchlike. Dicey, having grown up on the beach, knows how to build a driftwood fire and roast whatever they catch. And when they need more money, she asks for work at gas stations and supermarkets, washing windows (she's big on washing windows!) or carrying other people's groceries.

Still, the adult world continues to conspire to confound them. After a big catch of fish, she's told by a sports salesman that it's illegal to fish in the park where they're hiding out:

How were they supposed to eat then, Dicey asked herself. By buying food, she answered. The whole world was arranged for people who had money—for adults who had money. The whole world was arranged against kids. Well, she could handle it. Somehow.

Julie (of the Wolves) was unencumbered on the tundra, able to hunt whatever she needed. Subsisting on the land is all Dicey wants to do, but one may not, unfortunately, hunt in a Grand Union:

So, she had to earn some money. But how? There was that shopping center. It had a big parking lot, and a supermarket. She pictured it carefully, and then pictured herself coming out of the market with two big bags filled with fruit and meat and breads and cans of vegetables and pan to cook things in. And a can opener; it would be just her luck to forget the can opener.

In her daydream, the Dicey she saw walking out of the store with enough food for her family to eat for days, with her eyes smiling and a big grin stretching her mouth, that Dicey tripped and fell. The food scattered over the ground. The wheels of cars squashed the scattered oranges and bananas. A dog took the package of hamburger meat and ran away with it. The people around went off on their own ways, carrying their own heavy bags of groceries.

Was this how Momma felt? Was this why Momma ran away?

Usually, in the books where the need to be fed overrides—usually mercifully—the opportunity to mope over one's circumstances, the child in question also finds, surprisingly, that she can survive by her own wits, something she didn't know before. Dicey is a bit different. In a way, she's always been a survival machine, with instincts that automatically allow her to make the best of any situation, almost unconsciously. As she tells James when he's telling her how much he loves school, “It takes different things to make me glad....Like knowing we've got food...The ocean...And lots of room outdoors. But mostly the ocean. And the food too....”

I've somehow reached the end of this without talking through all of the adventures they have with adults—mainly because I, like Dicey, am apparently completely obsessed with food. There is, of course, Windy, the Yale student who is amused by the ragtag group and, after taking them to several meals at a diner, arranges a ride to Bridgeport for them. There's cousin Eunice, the only living relative of the deceased Aunt Cilla, whose cloying pressing of religion on the children becomes overwhelming. (“Cousin Eunice's house wasn't free, it was expensive—and the price was always remembering to be grateful.”) There's the totally creepy child molester who almost traps them on his tomato farm once they've made it to the Eastern shore, to try to find a grandmother they've only just learned about. And there's Will, the itinerant circus director who saves the children from creepy tomato man, and who, along with his partner, Celia, takes a shine to the children.

And though she's grateful to all the adults they meet along the way, Dicey finally realizes, like all those nearing the end of a quest, that in fact there's no need to stop:

“You know,” Dicey said, “we don't have to go anywhere. We could always travel like this, following the warm weather, like Will said he did. We can take care of ourselves.”

“Yeah, but what's the point?” James asked.

“There doesn't have to be a point,” Dicey said. “Just doing it. Like sailing.”

Could a kid with three siblings in tow manage nowadays to walk from Provincetown to Bridgeport, then get from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore? Could a person do it? (I can't even walk through my whole CITY.) Would our 2008, not 1978, recession prices make room for kids to eat, to make even enough money for a day, even eating off the dollar menu?

I don't think the point of Homecoming is how realistic it is, although, for it's own purposes, it's realistic enough. (Calling all authors: writing this same journey updated for 2008 would be AWESOME). Still, what's wonderful about Homecoming isn't only that Dicey and her siblings finally succeed. It's the understanding that world has forces, and resources, that we can marshal to our side if we're courageous and competent enough. When Dicey and James manage to convince two boys to take them across the bay to Easton, MD, Dicey realizes what she's been doing the entire journey:

Boats, waves, water, wind: through the wood she felt them working for her. She was not directing, but accompanying them, turning them to her use. She didn't work against them, but with them; and she made the boat do that too. It wasn't power she felt, guiding the tiller, but purpose.

You'd be wrong to sum Dicey up as “spunky” adventurer. She's not. She simply is—as her name suggests—a natural sailor.

• • • • •

Hello, my beauties! In honor of Dicey and her incessant water/food obsession, I am going to go to the beach shortly and eat a lot. And now for our Plotfinder winner! The book is, of course, Who Killed Peggy Sue, by one Eileen Goudge, and the winner, who murderously crept into my inbox at 4:45 p.m., is one Tina M. Congrats, Tina! Please email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your column request.

AND NOW FOR THIS WEEK'S, which comes from Nicole T. Ever since Nicole asked this, it has haunted me too. I have a feeling it's something GLARINGLY obvious, but I don't care; it's now driving me nuts too. M'aidez!

I'm desperate to find the name of this book that I was obsessed with in sixth grade. It's about a girl (aged 12-ish) who has two best friends (I'm thinking the more "grown up" friend may have been named Pam) and an older brother who tries to feel up the sides of his girlfriend's breasts while he applies sunblock to her back. There's a scene in a school bathroom where a group of girls are determining if they need bras yet via the "pencil test" - placing a pencil under the breast, and if it stays, you're brazier-ready. There's also a part where she and her friends discover Pam's father's Playboy collection. I seem to remember this all being in one book, though it may have been part of a series.

Of course my friends and I STILL do that pencil test, though now it's to assess encroaching decrepitude. Please, put us out of our misery immediately.

NOW...an extra chance to win a prize. It occurs to me that since I can't stop talking about food, it might be nice to hear about YOUR favorite YA-novel meals, or at least the ones you can't get out of your head. I am, of course, captive to the scene of 'Manzo and his family eating thick stacks of pancakes covered with butter, possibly but not necessarily during the same meal as some fried assortment of apples 'n onions. (I have seen other commenters bewitched by this one too.) If it is that one, or any other one, send me your YA fave with the words MEAL TICKET in the subject line, and I will pick one randomly for a free YA book from my massive and teetering collection. (You can just talk about it in the comments too, if you like.)

Hey. Did you know Fine Lines will be fried up as some sort of book, with onions? Would you like to hear about anything and everything related to it, i.e. be placed on a mailing list? If so, email jezziefinelines@gmail.com with MMMMMMMMM in the subject line, and I will put you on it!

Up next week:

Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume!

Week after that:

A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

After that, I am not sure! I am blind with hunger! I will figure something out. In the meantime, send your requests, assessments, irate missives and grammatical corrections to me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I will roast some fish over them.

Homecoming [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 'Go Ask Alice', the "anonymous"ly-written, 1971 story of a girl who keeps the worst kind of diary.

Yesterday I remember thinking I was the happiest person in the whole earth, in the whole galaxy, in all of God's creation.

I'm going to cop to a handicap right away and tell you I'm going to have a hard time writing about this book because it is false. I'm not an absurd stickler for the truth — although, had I been one of those people who read James Frey (I am not one of those people [she said snottily] who read James Frey), I would have been firmly with the my-money-back-please contingent, not the what-is-truth-anyway? claque. Looking at the first line above, I am inclined to blame myself somewhat, as disquisitions about God's creation are not high on the list of crucial topics for the teen female. However, I was eight, and it says "A REAL DIARY" right on the cover.

Objection filed. Go Ask Alice is, of course, the story of a nameless girl growing up sometime during the 1970s who is yanked out of a comfortable middle-class existence where "ten globby pounds of lumpy lard" are the worst problem she faces, into a life of drugs, prostitution, chaos and disrepute. I've always associated Go Ask Alice with weight loss (note to fake authors off teenage girls' diaries: don't present drugs as an awesome way to achieve weight loss), and on reread I can see that this is primarily because the author (WHOMSOEVER SHE MAY BE) spends 90% of the time building up the themes that are going to carry Alice right into a life of vice: fatness, family, social alienation, and hair issues. Here's an entry that wraps the whole thing up neatly:

February 8

Well, I've gained almost fifteen pounds since we've been here, my face is a mess and my hair is so stringy and oily I'd have to wash it every night to keep it decent. Dad is never home and Mom is on my back all the time, "Be happy, put up your hair, be positive, smile, show some spirit, be friendly," and if they tell me I'm acting negatively and immaturely one more time I'm going to gag. I can't wear any of the clothes I made before I came here and I know Tim is ashamed of me. When I'm around his friends he treats me like a dum-dum, insults me and makes remarks about my hippy hair. I'm getting fed up to here with this town and school in general and my family and myself in particular.

You know what's great for that? DRUGS. After a brief time with a new Jewish friend (with whom she wishes she could discuss her faith more—oy, CLUE, LIZZIE!), she falls in with the more popular crowd, going in two or three pages from a mousy grind to a shiny, happy person.

July 13

Dear Diary,

For two days now I've tried to convince myself that using LSD makes me a "dope addict" and all the other low-class, unclean despicable things I've heard about kids that use LSD and all the other drugs; but I'm so, so, so, so, curious, I simply can't wait to try pot, only once, I promise! I simply have to see if it's everything it's cracked up not to be! All of the things I've read about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents who obviously don't know what they're talking about; maybe pot is the same...

DUH. To continue:

July 20

Dear close, warm, intimate friend, Diary,

What a fantastic, unbelievable, expanding, thrilling week I've had. It's been like, wow—the greatest thing that has ever happened. Remember I told you I had a date with Bill? Well he introduced me to torpedos [?????] on Friday and Speed on Sunday. They are both like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better. The Speed was a little scary at first because Bill had to inject it into my arm. I remembered how much I hated shots when I was in the hospital, but this is different, now I can't wait, I positively can't wait to try it again. No wonder it's called Speed! I could hardly control myself, in fact I couldn't have if I had wanted to, and I didn't want to. I danced like I had never dreamed possible for introverted, mousy little me. I felt great, free, abandoned, a different, improved perfected specimen of a different, improved, perfected species. It was wild! It was beautiful! It really was.

You filthy, dirty, dope-fiend, you! From here, it is of course only one hop, skip, and a jump to losing her virginity to Bill, and then to horrifying her parents by truly hanging out and looking like a hippie. (Yes, she capitalized the Establishment.) You know what happens next, right? She starts dealing (pushing), of course, to grade-school kids:

....The high school kids are one thing and even junior high, but today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school level who was not even nine years old, I'm sure. I know that he in turn must be pushing...

Okay, watched-too-much-Wire. But having her infect the Cray-pa set is an important narrative step, as she is about to do something so odious to the character we'll need a little self-righteous distance to get through it:

December 3

Last night was the worst of my shitty, rotten, stinky, dreary fucked-up life. There were only four of us, and Shelia and Rod, her current "boyfriend," introduced us to heroin. At first we were afraid, but they convinced us that the horror stories were just pretty much American myths—ha!...the truth is I really couldn't wait when I was watching them set up. Smack is a great sensation, different from anything I've ever had before. I felt gentle and drowsy and wonderfully soft like I was floating above reality and the mundane things were lost forever in space. But just before I was too out of it to notice what was going on, I saw Shelia and that cocksucker she goes with lighting up and setting out speed. I remember wondering why they were getting high when they had just set us out on this wonderful low, and it wasn't until later I realized that the dirty sonsofbitches had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally. That had been their planned strategy all along, the low-class shit eaters.

Well! Language! I do remember even in my extreme youth being brought to quite a state of confusion by this half female-perpetrated rape, not that that can't HAPPEN, but with the grade-school pushing and the wrapping the hair in orange juice cans to straighten it we're stretching the boundaries of credulity somewhat.

And herein, the author whomsoeverthatmaybe commences 80 pages of itchy horror wherein our heroine embraces her family and alternately gets sucked back in ("After you've had it, there isn't even life without drugs. It's a prodding, colorless, dissonant bare existence. It stinks. And I'm glad I'm back. Glad! Glad! Glad!") then, after finally kicking the habit, is pulled back into it against her will by her former druggy friends, who hiss "you'll be back" at her and finally spike her peanuts with LSD when she's babysitting.

As an after-the-fact Judgy Von Judgementtown, I find myself unable to review this book on its own merits — although I'd like to think I might have caught that the book has so very few without even knowing it was churned out alongside several other "real diaries" to an increasingly skeptical public. However, what's fascinating to me now is how aggressively Alice was presented as a universal, saddled with the most normal problems imaginable — thereby making her subsequent drug use something your average ordinary girl could also slide into as easily as an unflattering skirt.

Alice's life, filled with parties, new friends, boyfriends, clothes, and a benign, caring family, is a plasticine ideal of the idea of a teenage girl's existence, a teen mass-produced for a public who needed to know, with all these people spelling establishment Establishment, how they ticked and how to stop them ticking. Now, what we have is almost a vintage Alice doll in plastic, with bendable limbs and teeny-weenie hippie-pants, Boyfriend dolls and mini-acid tabs for a girl to play with. It's unsurprising how appealing with found her, so clearly in possession of all the add-ons we'd hopefully get to play with one day. (Malibu Crash-Pad, anyone?) The problem with, at the end of the day, isn't that Alice is a lie. It's that she's a facsimile, not an individual — a proxy to play-act dramatic adventures with until it's time to put her and her mini-platform heels away.

• • • • •

Thank you guys for being so nice to my friend! At my violent behest, she will be returning in the next few months to handle a book or books I will leave for now as a secret, except for this one clue: there are actually never, at any time, 12 of them. And, if you didn't get a chance to check her out last week, if I can have a kvell-ing mama moment, please go buy all 329 of these and settle down for a week or two; you will not regret it. Attend particularly my favorite, Every Secret Thing, which is about 339 times darker than Go Ask Alice ever managed to be.

Kvell over! Moving onto the Plotfinder of two weeks ago, of which I of course have zero memory: Ah yes, cinnamon sticks. Many, many of you guessed this correctly, but clocking in at 4:10 for the win was one Aimee L., with The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman by Louise Plummer. Congrats, Aimee! Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your column request.

Now, for this week's Plotfinder, which comes from commenter BadenBaden, sans visual:

There was a 3- or 4-part series I read from my local library when I was about 14 or so (so probably around 1994-ish). I can’t remember the narrator’s name, but her best friend (and I think cousin) was murdered. Her name was April, and she was an artist. April was dating a dark, brooding character named Spike, who at some point in the book is a suspect in April’s disappearance. Meanwhile, there was a rich girl named Lacey (I think) who loved cookies but only drank diet cola (she always told April, “save the calories for the cookies.”). It’s amazing the things that stick out!

I am so, so eager to re-read this series, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything else about it. It doesn’t help that the copies I had from the library freebie cart were clearly stolen, since the covers were ripped off. So I don’t even have a visual!

Do you have any leads or ideas on what this series could be?

Do you? DO YOU FOR GOD'S SAKE? If so, please immediately send to jezziefinelines@gmail.com or put your answer in the comments. First correct answer gets to tell me what to do, which is something fewer and fewer people get to do nowadays, so...enjoy!

Items for your future reading if you so desire:

Next week: Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume!

Week after that: A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

More M.E. Kerr in the mix as well; I have been remiss on that one.

Lastly and most important, do not think I have failed to note the numerous demands for Christopher Pike stretching from this column's inception. Here's the thing: as an old, decrepit person, I missed him by maybe a decade. I mean, I think I read one at some time, but I fear I cannot do justice to the oeuvre. Never fear, however! I am seeking out a fun guest reviewer to do it and IT WILL BE DONE. If you'd like, maybe start sending the one you want THE MOST to jezziefinelines@gmail.com and I'll pass that on to.

Also, Fine Lines has spawned a book! Do you want to know all about anything that happens with it etc.? To sign up for the mailing list, send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with IT WILL BE DONE in the subject line and I will do it. I hope to actually have some VERY fun news related to it in a month or two, so this is not the worst time ever to sign up, not that I won't tell you all about it here anyway.

As always, send your requests, demands and desired incantations to me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I will totally be scared straight.

Go Ask Alice [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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, novelist/drunken folk art collector Laura Lippman reads 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase', Joan Aiken’s 1962 novel in which two cousins pretty much kick ass all across England, with a little help from loyal retainers and some very brave geese.

After tea . . . the children were set to mending. The meal had consisted of bread, dry this time, and a cup of water. Sylvia had contrived to save a half of her morsel of bread for Bonnie, and she pushed it into Bonnie’s hand later, as they sat working in the biggest classroom, huddled together for warmth. This was the only time of the day they were allowed to talk to each other a little.

. . . “We can’t stay here, Sylvia.”
“No, we can’t,” breathed Sylvia in heartfelt agreement. “But how can we possibly get away? And where would we go?”
“I’ll think of some plan,” said Bonnie with invincible optimism. “And you think, too, Sylvia. Think for all you are worth.”
Sylvia nodded. Then she whispered, “Hush, Diana Brisket’s looking at us,” and bent her head over the enormous rent in the satin petticoat she was endeavoring to repair.”

Whenever I visit my parents — not often enough as they would be the first to tell you — I always end up thinking about Maude. Yes, that Maude. One of the many All in the Family spin-offs of the 1970s, Maude centered on an “uncompromising, enterprising, anything but tranquilizing ” woman from Tuckahoe, New York. (By the way, several Internet sources claim it’s “that old compromising,” which makes NO sense.) Route 404, which winds through Maryland and Delaware, skirts Tuckahoe State Park, so every time I come to that part of the trip — well, then there’s Maude.

And now that I’ve got the Maude song fizzing around in everyone else’s head — what was really so extraordinary about this outspoken-but-privileged woman? Yes, she was mouthy, and, yes, she had one of television’s first legal abortions, but her restless intelligence now seems wasted to me. Did Maude work outside the home, or even volunteer? (In the home, she had Florida to clean for her, at least until Florida got her spin-off.) What did she do other than battle with her husband and pal around with future Golden Girl roomie Rue McClanahan?

I had a better role model closer at hand. In 1969, three years before Maude debuted, my mother enrolled in graduate school, intent on becoming a children’s librarian. There are many, many wonderful benefits to having a mother who wants to be a children’s librarian – weekly trips to the big library downtown, reading all the Newbery Award winners together, even Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, God help us — but the thing that stands out for me was the wonder of my mother’s class project. Using knitting needles and index cards, she and a classmate created what can only be described as a non-computerized search engine. They notched the cards with a series of holes, some open at the top. The open holes corresponded to key search criteria – author, reading level, subject matter. With the help of a numeric code, you inserted the needles into the cards and lifted; the cards that fell out were the ones that matched your criteria.
I have been thinking about my mother’s class project because a chance re-encounter with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase convinced me that it is my personal platonic ideal of children’s literature, the card that would fall if I could set up a system controlling for all my favorite things in books:

Clothing
Orphans, real or de facto
Villains
England
Nature Boys, a la Dickon
Specialized Schools — a boarding school, a school for the performing arts, an orphanage or — the dream that I have yet to find — an orphanage devoted to the performing arts.

Of course, there are lots of satisfying books that score in only one or two categories. I adore Maud Hart Lovelace’s happy families, thanks to the detailed descriptions of Merry Widow hats, shirtwaists and jabots, but Deep Valley, Minnesota, is far from England. Elizabeth Enright’s four-book series about the Melendy family offers only tantalizing rumors of boarding school, and only in the final book. E. Nesbit come awfully close, especially if you’re willing to consider the Psammead [cq] a boy with a special connection to nature. (Hey, he lives in a sandpit, it’s harder to get much closer to nature than that.) Noel Streatfeild’s “shoe” books qualify, although she often softened her villains in the final act. Except for Mrs. Winter, mother of Dulcie in Dancing Shoes. Remember how she turns away, at the end, when Rachel is revealed to be the big talent in the family? Could someone please tell me why the adorable Uncle Tom is married to that woman? This has bothered me for years.
But The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is the gold standard, the ne plus ultra of the Lippman COVENS Rule. Throw in an opening that reads like the YA version of James Joyce’s The Dead and... oh, excuse me, I passed out briefly from ecstasy. Here, see for yourselves:

It was dusk, winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.

And – damn you, Joan Aiken — it gets better. Chapter by chapter, event by event. Wolves has everything. A high-spirited rich girl (Bonnie Green), her virtuous poor relation (Sylvia Green), a tragic shipwreck, an evil governess, loyal retainers, an uncannily clever and gifted goose-tender, a horrible boarding school – run by Mrs. Brisket no less, who rewards snitches with little pieces of cheese. And I’m not even going to tell you how the geese foil a dastardly crime.
Aiken, the daughter of Conrad Aiken, is a brisk tour guide. “Do try to keep up,” she all but demands as the story steams along, “we have so much ground to cover.” Sylvia, an orphan (O!) has left her Aunt Jane in London (E!) to go stay with cousin Bonnie, who will be de facto parentless (O!) while Lord Willoughby and Lady Green take a voyage intended to mend Lady Green’s fragile health. Sylvia, genteel but poor, worries that her sole doll, Annabelle, will be humiliated by Bonnie’s dolls for wearing only a “funny little old pelisse!” (C!) Sharing her train compartment with an odd man named Grimshaw (V!), she also frets about her aunt’s very Victorian edict that she never eat in front of a stranger, difficult to do when a train ride takes almost two days. And in the middle of all these little girl anxieties, she has to deal with wolves, literal ones.

“[T]he train had stopped with a jerk. [Yes, his name is Mr. Grimshaw! Thank you, I’m here all week.]
‘Oh! What is it? Where are we?’ she exclaimed before she could stop herself.
“No need to alarm yourself, miss,’ said her companion, looking unavailingly out of the black square of window. ‘Wolves on the line, most likely – they often have trouble hereabouts.’
‘Wolves!’ Sylvia stared at him in terror.
“They don’t often get into the train, though,’ he added reassuringly. ‘Two years ago they managed to climb into the guard’s van and eat a pig, and once they got the engine driver – another had to be sent in a relief engine – but they don’t often eat a passenger, I promise you.’”

If Sylvia was reassured by the notion that the wolves don’t OFTEN eat passengers, she is much braver than I. Yet the wolves turn out to be among the more benign forces that threaten Sylvia and Bonnie in this book. Nature can be thwarted, it turns out. People are much more trickier.

Things sour quickly at Willoughby Manor. Miss Slighcarp (V!), the new governess — and a distant relation — is about as nice as one would expect, given that her name is Miss Slighcarp. She wastes no time trying on Lady Green’s clothes — including (swoon) “a rose-colored crepe with aiguillettes of diamonds on the shoulders. It did not fit her exactly.” (Nice bitchy aside there from meek little Sylvia.) Mr. Grimshaw, the mysterious man from Sylvia’s train, is skulking about, and no good ever came from skulking. Then news comes that the Willoughbys’ ship has sunk, and the girls are packed off quickly to the “boarding school” (S!) run by Mrs. Brisket (V!). The only coddled child in the place is Mrs. Brisket’s own Diana, a selfish brat, and there is a wonderful scene involving Bonnie, Diana and some fresh eggs, in which you will cheer because someone does NOT get slapped.

A quick aside about orphans: For me, the “O” is the central letter in COVENS. Why do I love them so much? It’s true, I was a latch-key kid, but my mother didn’t start working until I was in junior high, so I had the best of both worlds. The simple fact is that most children’s books benefit when some sort of contrivance whisks the parents offstage. It doesn’t have to be death (although there are a lot of dead moms in my favorite books) or a demanding job (lots of widowers, too, throwing themselves into their work since mom’s demise). An adults-only trip or troubling surgery (The Time Garden, Knight’s Castle) works just as well. And there’s always boarding school! (The Great Brain at the Academy, The Fog Comes in On Little Pig’s Feet, Apples Every Day.) But, of course, we don’t want them to stay parent-less. That would be much too bleak.

In Wolves, the real orphans finally receive much-deserved succor, while the hateful Diane Brisket finds herself quite alone in the world. Yet it is Aiken’s treatment of Diana, in the final act of comeuppances, that makes me love the novel even more.

The orphans, still dazed at their good fortune, sat at a table of their own, eating roast turkey and kindly averting their gaze from the pale cheeks and red eyes of Diana Brisket, who, having been in a position to bully and hector as much as she pleased, was now reduced to a state where she had not a friend to stand by her . . . Diana had nowhere to go and was forced, willy-nilly, to stay with the orphans (where, it may be said in passing, wholesome discipline and the example of Aunt Jane’s unselfish nature soon wrought an improvement in her character.)

You see, there are no bad children — only bad adults. Otis Spofford, Dulcie-Pulsie in Dancing Shoes, even The Bully of Barkham Street all have their sides to the story. But grown-ups? Grown-ups can really suck. Possibly because they did not receive a timely intervention from Aunt Jane. I would add that to COVENS – No bad children, only bad grown-ups – but it would screw up an acronym that took me, literally, hours to formulate. Please don’t tell my editor, who thinks I’m working on a novel. Oh, wait — like every other sentient female reader, she follows Fine Lines religiously. Damn.

• • • • •

No Plotfinder this week because I am trying to meet two deadlines by summer’s end. Also, I am much lazier than Lizzie. However, here’s a tip for those who love the YA novels written by Lenora Mattingly Weber from 1944-1972, the majority centering on stubborn Denver teenager Beany Malone. Every one of my Tess Monaghan novels has a Weber homage. The problem is, I have a terrible memory, soI forget what most of them are. One example: the law firm in my first series book, Baltimore Blues, is called the Triple O. Beanyphiles know that this is a reference to the hush-hush private club, On Our Own, in Beany Has a Secret Life. So if anyone ever finds themselves with A LOT of time to waste and an encyclopedic knowledge of Weber’s oeuvre, drop me a line via my website [www.lauralippman.com] when you find a Weber reference.

Laura Lippman has written thirteen novels, including the New York Times bestsellers “What the Dead Know” and “Another Thing to Fall.” A journalist for twenty years, she left the Baltimore Sun in 2001, back when it was still widely believed that the Internet was a fever that would break and all you crazy kids would eventually start reading newspapers like proper grown-ups. Oops! She lives in Baltimore. Her first collection of short stories, “Hardly Knew Her,” will be published in September.

The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase [Amazon]
Laura Lippman [LauraLippman.com]

Earlier: 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 'Stranger With My Face', Lois Duncan's 1981 novel in which Laurie Stratton gets every girl's wish: to be adopted, and to have a secret twin sister.

My name is Laurie Stratton. I am seventeen years old, and I live at the Cliff House on the northern tip of Brighton Island.

Would it have been so hard to let me astrally project, God? I know the telepathy was not a possibility, as by second grade, my peers and I were already running numerous controlled studies using the means of scrap paper and different corners of the room, and to succeed would have granted me far too much power amongst them. I know you gave me precognition that one time about winning that contest in 8th grade and it was so spooky I could never have handled any more spook. I am way too OCD to move things with my mind, and I know, as I am not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I cannot be a witch. HOWEVER.

I don't see what the PROBLEM would have been with allowing me to freaking LEAVE MY BODY FROM TIME TO TIME AND TRAVEL THE WORLD, BOUND ONLY BY AN INVISIBLE CORD LINKED TO MY TRUE SPIRIT WHILE MY BODY WAS TEMPORARILY A HUSK, A SHELL, TO ALL APPEARANCES DEAD!

In any case, Laurie Stratton, unbeknownst-to-self-child-of-the-Navajo-with-twin-sister, is far more blessed than I. (Nava-ho!) In Stranger With My Face, Duncan has ditched her typical Southwest setting for the rocky shoals of coastal New England, where our heroine lives with her mother and father, a painter and writer, respectively, and two sweet younger siblings, Neal and Megan. Also in the mix is Laurie's so-psyched-to-no-longer-be-gawky prize of a ripped boyfriend, Gordon; a brooding, darkly handsome acquaintance, Jeff, whose face was half-burned off by an exploded can of lighter fluid; and, of course, an expert outsider WITH insider extrasensory knowledge, Laurie's schoolmate Helen Tuttle, who has recently moved from the Southwest and becomes Laurie's new friend.

Interestingly, the first few scenes of the novel, as befits the events to come, are rife with splits in which one element is not only the opposite of the other, but the veritable photo negative. First is Laurie's passage from gawky to glamorous—a constant Duncan trope at the beginnings of her novel's. Laurie's improved looks not only alter her appearance but her entire social currency:

In every girl's life, I guess, there must be one special summer that is a turning point, a time of stretching and reaching and blossoming out and leaving childhood behind. This was the summer that had happened to me. The year before, I had been awkward and gawky, all pointed knees and sharp elbows and bony rib cage, hiding my shyness behind a book while girls like Natalie Coleson and Darlene Briggs wriggled around in their bikinis and got boys to buy them Cokes and rub them with baby oil.

This summer it had all been different. The first day I walked out onto the beach, clutching my book and my beach towel, I heard a wolf whistle.

Another split is found in Jeff Rankin, a former crush of Laurie's who is now moody and withheld, though il a raison:

He was fourteen that first year, with the sort of dark, flashy good looks that by rights should have belonged to someone much older. The second summer he came, he had a motor bike, and there was always some squealing girl sitting on it behind him, with her arms wrapped around his waist and her chin on his shoulder. Sometimes her hair was dark and blond and sometimes red, but it was always long and shiny, flying out behind them like the tail of a comet as they went roaring down the road.

I turned fourteen myself that year—a skinny, flat-chested fourteen—and I dreamed at night about what it would be like to be one of those girls.

....it was a good thing Jeff did have that summer, because halfway through the next one a can of lighter fluid exploded and burned off half his face...

The left side of his face was fine. If you saw him at a certain angle, you'd have thought he was the best-looking guy you'd ever seen. If you saw him from the right, you had to stop and swallow hard.

It occurs to me that even the fact that Laurie is recounting, not experiencing, the events in question, leads to a sort of narrative split, the dreadful present aftermath merging with a golden past. (Does not "There was a time when I, too, loved Cliff House," have more than a whiff of "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again"?)

However, the biggest initial split is with Laurie and her own family—from whom she is inherently estranged, just as Jeff is to his old face, by looks:

I didn't have the sort of looks you found just everywhere. Gordon kidded sometimes that I could be part Indian with my dark coloring, high cheekbones and almond eyes. "Bedroom eyes," he called them, meaning they were sexy. My father referred to them as "alien" because they were the same shape as the eyes he gave to the maidens from other worlds in his novels. When I looked at my parents—both of them so fair—and at Neal and Meg with their light blue eyes and freckled noses, I wondered sometimes how I had managed to be born into such a family.

Well, duh, you weren't! However, we don't learn this from Dad and Mom. (Who, p.s., are a "night person" and a "day person" whose schedules only briefly coincide, just to pile this kind of thing on.) Instead, we learn this from a sepulchral presence around town who people keep mistaking for Laurie. As the days pass, "Laurie" appears at a party the actual Laurie has begged off of, enraging Gordon; in the house, confusing Laurie's parents; at the Post Office, where she accepts a birthday invite that she fails to pass on, enraging the birthday girl; and in various lonely poses around the dunes surrounding Cliff House.

Laurie is beside herself at how this could be happening, but, luckily, Helen Tuttle, child of the Southwest, holder of knowledge of the Navajo, and former girlfriend of Luis, a Navajo, is there to point out an explanation other than Laurie's going crazy:

...."I was home in bed the whole time,"

"You weren't using astral projection, were you?" Helen asked.

"Using what?" I said in bewilderment.

"You know—sending your mind out from your body? Luis's father used to be able to do it."

Aw, sheet. Is someone gonna take a book or two out from the library? You know they is! Okay, but getting ahead of myself. Laurie finally gets the answer to her question, when she is visited, in a profound dream, by Lia, who claims to be her twin sister and leans across and gives her a spooky astral-projection kiss. At this point, in possession of a towering mountain of supernatural proof, Laurie confronts her parents, whose reaction is, to put it mildly, not-open. "The trend today is toward total openness about adoption," her father says. "Still, that idea has been upsetting to your mother....Laurie, it's not that big a deal. You're the same person you always were. You're our beloved daughter....Now that you know your background, there's nothing left for you to wonder about. Can't we just file this away and get on with our normal lives?"

Um, let's just file THAT away for a second, and I will come back to it. (Incidentally, as someone who's approximately 9,873 years old, I have to admit I remember very well when this kind of secrecy was the norm, oh young Juno fans.) What's more key for the plot at this point is her mother's explanation of why her parents, confronted with a set of beautiful, mixed-blood Navajo twins to adopt, did not just snag both:

"Then, why—" The question rose to my lips without my even realizing that I was going to ask it. "Why did you take me instead of her?"

"We couldn't raise both of you," Dad said. "We were going out on a limb to take even one dependent at that point in our lives."

"That's not what I asked," I said. "What I want to know is, why did you choose me over my sister?"

There was a moment's silence as my parents exchanged glances.

Then Dad said slowly, "Your mother—your mother, well, she thought—"

"I didn't want her," Mother said. Her normally gentle voice was strangely sharp. "I just didn't want her. I wanted you."

"But if we were just a like—"

"You weren't alike," Mother said. "You looked just alike—both of you so beautiful with big, solemn eyes and all that thick, dark hair. The people at the agency wanted us to take you both, and despite what Dad says, I really think we might have done it. It seemed wrong to separate twin sisters. I picked you up and cuddled you, and I knew I never wanted to let you go. It was as though you were meant to be ours. Then I handed you to Dad to hold and picked up the other baby, and—and—"

"And what?" I prodded.

"I wanted to put her down."

BECAUSE LIA IS EVIL, OBVIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!! And, of course, the machinations of Lia's evil, as they unfold in the novel, are great fun. Not only does she put Helen Tuttle in the hospital (the ability of specters to put people in hospitals in the novels of Lois Duncan must only be exceeded by the ability of the shark in the Jaws franchise to increasingly have the ability to handily kill people on dry land), she lures Jeff and Laurie to a near-death experience, and, having alienated Laurie completely from her peers and those who love her, manages to invade her body and steal her entire life.

BUT NOT SO FAST, LIA!

Because rather than entirely cut the cord of Laurie Stratton from all the elements of her life, ironically, Lia's invasion, in the end, strengthens them. Lia's ruining of friendships brought on Laurie's new social status only makes Laurie realize how tenuous those bonds were in the first place, and how glad she can be in Helen's truer loyalty. Her interruption of the placid family structure of the Strattons forces Laurie's parents to realize how damaging their inability to face Laurie's adoption was, which in turn allows Laurie to realize she is, in the end, a Stratton who loves and is loved her family. And, most important, when Lia splits Laurie and Gordon apart, she actually brings Jeff and Laurie together—not coincidentally because Jeff, unlike Gordon, is willing to face the question of Lia and Laurie's adoption, and he's also willing to talk about the weirder question of what Megan calls Laurie's "ghosty":

"Look, Jeff, there's no sense in our discussing this. You don't believe in astral projection, and I don't blame you. I couldn't accept it myself until just recently." A question occurred to me. "What were you doing here the night you thought you saw me? There's no reason for anyone to come out this way unless he's coming to Cliff House."

"I walk here sometimes because you live here," Jeff said.

Um, line of dialog in Sixteen Candles where Jake tells Molly Ringwald that he's come to the church because "I heard you were here," you have a freaking RIVAL FOR BEST LINE EVER!

But, even though the ostensible point of the novel is that looks don't matter because those who love us, like Laurie's savior and little sister Megan, can look past them to the true self beneath, of course, looks do matter. Not only are they a constant subject within Laurie's family before Laurie knows about Lia, as the novel commences, Laurie and Jeff's changing looks have reversed the course of their entire lives. Duncan's point about our appearance versus our true self is much more subtle. In the scene where Laurie, loosed from her own body, regards the sleeping Lia, we can see that clearly:

She was a duplicate of myself....yet there were differences.

This girl's ears were pierced, and mine were not. Mother and I had gone through a few rounds on that issue, and she had won. "There are enough natural holes in a person's anatomy," she had said firmly.

....There was a tiny scar on the chin that might have been nothing more than the result of scratching an insect bite, but it was a scar that I did not have.

There was a mole on the neck at a spot where I had no mole.

I continued my inspection...She had perfect fingernails, the kind that had always filled me with envy. My own had a scraggly look, not exactly "bitten to the quick," but "slightly gnawed."

Small things. Unimportant. Almost unnoticeable, yet they spelled the difference between Lia Abbott and Laurie Stratton.

So it is not that looks don't matter. Not only do they matter to others—they matter because they reflect choices we have made, what has been done by us and to us. Our looks may start with what life had dealt us, but they are also about the lives we lead. So it's not that you can't read a book by its cover. It's that if you do (look up), it's not the title or illustration you should look at — it's the nicks, creases, and dog-ears that tell the tale.

• • • • •

Hello, my pretties! Okay, for this week's extraordinarily depressing Plotfinder there were few called and fewer still to serve. The winner, beating my best friend's, "Ooooo, I know I read that but I can't remember the title," which I think I will start to refer to as a Not-finder, was the commenter The Former June Bronson, who clocked in with Randy at 12:59 pm. Ms. Bronson, I can find no supporting information for this book whatsoever and am not even sure if this is the right Randy. (YOU try plugging "Randy" into Google.) However, we operate on the honor system at Jezebel, and I'm sure I will imminently receive delighted confirmation from my Not-finder in any case.

Now, onto this week's Plotfinder, which comes from reader Hannah K., and kind of makes me hungry:

It's about this girl (I think her name is Kate) who is really tall, and her older brother's friend comes to visit for the winter holidays with his hot girlfriend, but is reminded of his childhood crush on the protagonist and stuff starts to develop between them...and there is this part right at the beginning in the supermarket where she's buying cinnamon sticks and she sees their elderly neighbor, who later dies (I think), and there is this episode about mice in somebody's car engine getting killed (maybe the neighbor?), and ultimately she starts dating the guy but her (former?) best friend steals him from her at a Christmas party at somebody's aunt's tacky mansion, and she sees them kissing and, like, dumps him forever, and ultimately the boy camps outside the house (I hope this is all from the same book) to win back her love and everything is OK in the end. Also, I think she wears glasses?

As always, send your guesses to jezziefinelines@gmail.com or stick 'em in the comments. First one with correct guess gets to choose a column, and I'll do it.

I'd also like to give a shoutout to readers Ilona and Hillary, who provided me with scans of the cover you see above—each, incidentally, marked distinctly by its owner. For their labors, they will each receive a vintage copy of Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes from my personal collection.

Next week, the lovely and talented Mizz Laura M. Lippman guests with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase so I can buy some goddamn cinnamon sticks in peace. After that, we'll resume our regular schedule our pre-informing for your future reading purposes, but for now, like Laurie, languish briefly in the mystery.

Did you hear? A book approaches! Glory to! Would you like to know all about it? You would? Send me an email at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words, YES, I HAVE TO DO THIS EVERY WEEK in the subject line and I'll put you on it.

As ever, send your Plotfinder requests, objections and obfuscations to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Rest assured, I take each email in my inbox, prepare to leap, and scream "Erase the words!" before I break free of this mortal coil.

Stranger With My Face [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 'Happy Endings Are All Alike', the 1978 Sandra Scoppettone novel about two young lesbians who want to be together in the worst way.

Sometime around the invention of email, slowly drifting into cubicle death, I sent the following email to a high school friend I hadn't spoken to in years:

Hils, What's the name of the book where there are two lesbians and the girl gets raped under a tree? Not My Sweet Audrina. There are two girls on the cover. How are you?
Lizzie

The friend in question did not even bother to respond to the perfunctory closing query. Addressing only the former, she zinged back simply:

HAPPY ENDINGS ARE ALL ALIKE!!!!!

Such is the power of this novel, which I had borrowed from the friend in question for months until I was forced to finally return it, then commenced idly thinking about roughly every three days since. It wasn't only that there were lesbians, or rape, or pretty girls in polo tees with shiny hair on the cover who I might grow up to look like. It was that, like so much of the work of Paula Danziger or Paul Zindel, it presaged a world for us filled with more than gym teachers hurling basketballs at us (see Plotfinder), alive with teenagers struggling with the new complexity of adult relationships—one in which gym teachers, lesbian or no, weren't anywhere near the center of the drama.

I'd like to provide the nut graf for Happy Endings Are All Alike, but Scoppettone's first paragraph does it so admirably it seems a shame to mess with it:

Even though Jaret Tyler had no guilt or shame about her love affair with Peggy Danziger she knew there were plenty of people in this world who would put it down. Especially in a small town like Gardener's Point, a hundred miles from New York City. She and Peggy didn't go around wearing banners, but there were some people who knew.

Considering the hullabaloo about teenage sex—ANY kind of teenaged sex—nowadays, pretty much every sentence of that paragraph is mind-blowing. But remember, this is the fictional world 1978, where parents might mention Susan Brownmiller as quickly as they asked you to set the table. Castigated by her sister, Peggy thinks resentfully to herself, "You weren't a pervert just because you loved someone of your own sex, for God's sake!" And, as the preternaturally well-adjusted Jaret puts it to said mother: "Look, I know where you're coming from, Mom, but don't let it freak you out. I'll tell you this: Whatever I did with boys I found really boring. I didn't get turned on, okay?....And it's got nothing to do with you and Dad. I mean, you didn't make some terrible mistake in raising me or anything. And it's not so terrible. In fact, it's pretty nice. So don't lay a guilt trip on yourself, okay?" Okay! And don't forget the napkins!

But just because Peggy and Jaret — and, nominally, their semi-informed families — are not completely up in arms about their relationship, it doesn't mean they are off the hook entirely. The ancillary characters are brought in to project the basic prejudices of their time— a narrative conceit that might seem clumsy in an adult novel but it, be-LIEVE me, provided crucial info for an eight year old girl.

First to hold a nasty grudge at the girls' love is Peggy's sister Claire, who is jealous not only of her sister's favor with their father but her looks:

She lit another cigarette, sending up a smoke screen between herself and the mirror. Again her mind fixed on Peggy and Jaret. Both of them were attractive. Jaret might even be considered beautiful. Dammit, she was beautiful...by male standards, she was a knockout. And that was what really made Claire crazy. Jaret Tyler could have had any boy or man she wanted and she wanted none. Peggy, too, could have had her pick. And who did they choose? Each other. It was sick. Crazy. Enraging. Why, when they could have the cream of the crop, did they want each other?

Okay, first lesson—people think if you're a good-looking, not getting with a man is a waste. Lies! Check. Scoppettone's second lesson: Not all heterosexual relationships are happy, or free of complication—but that doesn't mean married women are all oppressed. Jaret's parents are a case in point: While Kay, her mother, muses her husband is madly in love with her, she thinks with irritation how she's truly invested in his looks, even if she allows him to think it's the other way around:

He often accused her of regarding him as nothing more than a sex object and she had a hard time denying it. "Well, kid," she often said, "I can't help it if you're a looker." "What about my mind?" he'd ask. Kay would shrug and say, "Who needs it?"

Of course, she didn't really mean it. She just said it to keep Bert aware of the way women were treated. And he knew that. What he didn't know what that Kay was not overwhelmed by his mind.

Kay is an interesting character—an aggressively liberated Mom who is deeply disturbed at how disturbed she is about her daughter's new relationship:

She lit a fresh cigarette. [If you're thinking of lesbians, grab a smoke.] Kay had read everything she could find on the subject of homosexuality and lesbianism and what she'd read wasn't that helpful. There were many theories as to why a person turned out to be a lesbian—environment, chromosomes, choice—and a lot of big, fat blanks. No one really seemed to know. Nevertheless, Kay couldn't help blaming herself and Bert. But why blame? Why the need to put it in those terms? She knew it was because she still had one foot in the fifties and a lesbian life-style was not what she'd had in mind for her daughter; it was not something she could fully accept as normal, no matter how liberated she might be

Oh, what a fraud she was! Pretending to Jaret is was all fine with her, simply swell, because she wanted Jaret to like her, to think she was cool! What she really wanted to do was throw herself at her feet and beg her to see a psychiatrist so she'd get over this thing.

Equally equivocating is Peggy's friend Bianca, who reacts to the news with blase sophistication until one day Peggy, chatting with her in the bedroom, tells her sweating friend to take off her clothes, then is shocked and appalled to realize she thinks she's hitting on her:

"Besides," said Peggy, "do you think I'm interested in all females?"

"I thought...I don't know," she said, somewhat ashamed.

"No, I guess you don't. I thought you understood. I mean, are you interested in every guy you see?"

This was not only a revolutionary piece of transitory logic to a third-grader, but also a good schooling in the minor injustices visited on people who are different by well-meaning people, particularly (primarily!) their own friends. But if the emotional travails of their friends and family were the only ones in store for the girls, this would be a fairy story, not a political coming-of-age. There are deeper dangers in a character named Mid, a friend of Jaret's brother Chris and no less disturbing for being stereotypically disturbed. Musing he'd like to "knock [Jaret] on her ass" for being so good-looking and aloof, he stalks her and finds out that she and Peggy have been making love in the woods. Not realizing Peggy and Jaret's rareifed world is only agonized about their girls' predilections, not apt to disown them for them, he decides he can rape her with impunity.

The rape scene is long and awful and I APOLOGIZE for their being like 88 rape scenes in these columns lately. But the introduction of sex to girls, however it is rendered, is such a constant trope in the novels, it is instructive to think of how it's handled by the character—in this case, Jaret, who is shocked and destroyed, though not permanently—and by the author, whose scene is neither maudlin nor lurid, but simply chilling:

"I hate your guts," he whispered.

Why then? she wondered apathetically. His movement continued. Her head was turned to the side. Breathing became difficult. Month after month passed. Staring at the landscape, she wondered why the seasons didn't change. Where was the snow? She longed for snow, cool, white. Snow would stop the burning inside. She felt her body rock as Mid's movements quickened. Would she break apart? Explode into pieces of flesh, bone, blood, flying through the air, sticking to trees, bushes?

Was 8—or anything but 18, for that matter—too young to be exposed to this kind of thing? As horrifying as it was, I don't think so. The early exposure to injustice from someone on Jaret's side absolutely is a powerful tonic to defend against the crappy justice system the reader is going to grow into. The sheriff Jaret has to deal with after the rape is cut from the same cloth as Are You in the House Alone's awful lawman, and as awful to watch as the parents who stand up for their girls are a relief:

"What's the name of her boyfriend?"

"What does that have to do with anything?" Kay asked.

"Pardon?" said Foster.

"Why do you want to know about a boyfriend? She was horribly beaten. It has nothing to do with a boyfriend."

"Pardon, Mrs.," Foster said, "but you're out of your element here, so to speak. The girl was raped and we have to find the perpetrator. Now, please, let me do my job."

"This is a crime of violence," Kay went on, "not a sexual one."

Foster cacled, took a swipe at his nose with thumb and forefinger. "Well, if rape ain't sexual then I don't know what it is."

"Well, I have news for you," Kay persisted, her voice rising. "It ain't sexual. It's aggressive and it's violent and it's based on hatred of women, not desire for them."

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH DON'T YOU WANT TO KILL HIM! (Just wait until he gets to the part later about how it didn't matter that Jaret was raped because a) she's not a virgin and b) she's a lesbian.) So, say what you will about early exposure, but it definitely gave you your feminist talking points—of which I have personally amassed a very large collection ever since.

But—despite these handy fillips—what's wonderful about Happy Endings Are All Alike is how it chooses to not devolve into a paroxysm of blame. Not only is Jaret's lesbianism not Kay's fault—it's not a fault—but it or the rape doesn't turn Jaret bitter against men, which is another prejudice Scoppettone uses the book to debunk. After Jaret's brother, Chris, beats up Mid, he realizes it was unnecessary:

"Chris, you know, we never talked about what you did that day. Going after Mid like that."

"What's to talk about?"

"Why'd you do it?"

"What d'you mean? He hurt you, I wanted to hurt him. Simple." He looked past her shoulder.

"Is that the only reason?"

"Sure, what else?"

"I don't know." She touched his hand. "Are you angry with me? Do you hate me?"

He was shocked, sat up. "Me? Hate you? No. I thought....I mean, wow....I thought you hated me."

"Why?" she asked, dumbfounded.

"Well, I'm a....a guy."

"I don't hate men, Chris."

"You don't? Then how come....I mean, you come you're a...."

"A lesbian? It's not such a terrible word. I'm not sure why but it definitely isn't because I hate men."

"Not even after what happened?"

"No. I'm angry with him, Mid, but not all men. Not you."

"I thought for sure"—he cleared his throat—"lesbians hated men."

"Well, we don't. But what's that got to do with you going after Mid? And don't tell me it was just because he hurt me because I won't buy it."

Christ stood up, shuffled back and forth at the end of the bed. Then he said, "I thought if you saw a guy do something good, you know, kind of breave....well, I thought maybe you wouldn't think all guys were so bad."

"Oh, Chris." Jaret loved him more then than she ever had.

I started this review talking about how this book was brain-searing simply for its depiction of an adult romantic relationships, and I think that's true, for an eight-year-old read. But what I find so interesting as an adult is not the depiction of the romantic relationship, which, happily, seems very normal to me now, or the depiction of the rape, which, unhappily, also does, but what passes between all the family members once Jaret and Peggy come clean, and then when Jaret is assaulted. Both are huge bombs dropped on the people who love them, but Instead of making the family and friends betray the girls, Scoppettone instead deals with the ways they feel they are—and especially why they feel they are. No family members, including Peggy and Jaret, are at fault for anything. That's a good lesson to know. But, in a novel where all of the relationships are as complex as Peggy and Jaret's love, it's nice to know that, in one author's view, family is not a fault.

• • • • •

Guys, I am sorry the columns of late have been SO RAPE-Y! Seriously, no mas. Stranger With My Face has bodily invasion but no raping, and I am assured The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has neither. Whew!

Moving right along, Australia/France or no, once again you Plotfinders (that's a designation and an appellation) pulled through! The solution was Hating Allison Ashley, and the winner, by email, was one un-hateable Andria A. Andria, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize of the choice of one column.

This week's Plotfinder comes from reader Patricia C., and is the last misery I will do before embarking on a summer of happy happy happy:

a teen whose parents own a gym
gets pregnant
her father actually tries to get her to miscarry by throwing one of those gym balls at her hard
she leaves home
gets forced into prostitution after having her baby
i'm guessing it gets worse for her (how can that be?)
so she goes back home to the gym leaves her baby on the floor and drowns herself in the hot tub.

Our gym teacher really did throw gym balls—HARD—at us, but just because this was the days before they made them stop doing that kind of thing. I will not throw anything at you if you guess this incorrectly. Answers in the comments or by email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, and fame and fortune to the first in.

For your reading information, next week is Lois Duncan's...

Stranger With My Face

and the following week the marvelous Laura Lippman guesting with...

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase!

I haven't yet decided on where we'll be after that. I have all of your WONDROUS suggestions, but if you want to really really get me when I'm vulnerable, be all vociferous and shit for your desired work, and I will probably be swayed. As ever, send your requests, valedictions and remonstrations to jezziefinelines@gmail.com.

Also, you may have heard: There is to be a book! Do you want to read all about it? Do you have a better title for me than "Read All About It"? Fantastic! To be on the mailing list for any events and news regarding the upcoming creation, send me an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words I'LL HELP YOU THINK OF A TITLE in the subject line and I'll put you on it.

(One last thing: here is one commenter who has asked several times if anyone has heard of Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum and remained unanswered. I can't stand to let anyone wander in the wilderness this way. Reader: I read it. It was one of my faves, too, and I will try to get it into the column soon.)

Happy Endings Are All Alike [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 Paul Zindel's 1969 novel 'The Pigman', in which two teens, John and Lorraine, discover that life is no day at the zoo.

Now, I don't like school, which is what you might say is one of the factors that got us involved with this old guy we nicknamed the Pigman. Actually, I hate school, but then most of the time I hate everything.

I'm glad nowadays that therapists and Masters-in-teaching programs are here to minister to the maladjusted amongst us, but I'm not sure I love what they've done for literature. It's not that the notion of the dysfunctional family has disappeared — obviously we are beset by a new indie film about the crushing complexity of family life set to a charming soundtrack every other week. (I just can't trust any work of art that reverts to the profile of a teen lying upon a bed and a guitar riff as any kind of a gesture towards plot.) But Paul Zindel, former high school teacher and avatar of a certain stretch of miserable adolescence, knew both plot and teen peril. In his garbage heap of a world, adults, pressed into a strata of pure misery, wait calmly for the crush to descend on their children, who have little but their mordant wit and a fast-dwindling sense of good to hold it at bay.

John Conlan, high school student, is a blue-eyed, good-looking career prevaricator who drinks too much and has a soft spot for any hint of enthusiasm, however hokey. (Planning a prank on yet another substitute teacher, he desists because the old guy is so excited about telling the students about commemorative stamps.) His friend Lorraine is obsessed equally with omens and psychoanalysis, worried about her weight, mildly in love with John, and equally given to ruminating about the destroyed adults around her:

I mean, take the Cricket for instance. I mean Mrs. Reillen. She's across the library watching me as I'm typing this, and she's smiling. You'd think she knew I was defending her. She's really a very nice woman, although it's true her clothes are too tight, and her nylons do make this scraaaaaaatchy sound when she walks. But she isn't trying to be sexy or anything. If you could see her, you'd know that. She just outgrew her clothes. Maybe she doesn't have any money to buy new ones or get the old ones let out. Who knows what kind of problems she has? Maybe she's got a sick mother at home like Miss Stewart, the typing teacher. I know Miss Stewart has a sick mother at home because she let me mark some typing papers illegally and drop them off at her house after school one day. And there was her sick mother—very thin and with this smile frozen on her face—right in the middle of the room! That was this strange part. Miss Stewart kept her mother in this bed right in the middle of the living room, and it almost made me cry....When I look at Miss Reillen I feel sorry. When I hear her walking I feel even more sorry for her because maybe she keeps her mother in a bed in the middle of the living room room just like Miss Stewart. Who would want to marry a woman who keeps her sick mother in a bed in the middle of the living room?

Sorry to type that whole huge thing. But that's the question for John and Lorraine—how are they going to grow into any kind of a life without the miserable specter of their parents—basically, death writ large—smack in the middle of it? When we meet them, there is no aspect of John or Lorraine's life not entirely shadowed. Lorraine's mother is a home nurse ministering to people who are dying, from whom she steals the occasional can of soup, while remaining obsessed with making sure Lorraine doesn't get loose with boys at the same time she informs her she's not very good-looking. John's father, whom he calls "The Bore," and his mother, who is obsessed with deodorizing everything, are fonder of John's older stockbroker brother, Kenneth, than they are of their incendiary younger son. ("Be your own man!" his father says. "But for God's sake get your hair cut — you look like an oddball.")

Which explains why John and Lorraine are so drawn to Mr. Angelo Pignati, a man they befriend after prank-calling him as members of a fake neighborhood charity. As John says, the Pigman — so called because of the enormous collection of novelty pigs he shows them — is the absolute reverse of all the adults they know: Not only filled with native good humor, but innocently trusting and loving of those around him in a world where the default mode towards them is antagonistic. The Pigman isn't trying to be on their level or drag them down, he just delights in their company: "In fact," says John, "the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn't go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there's on way to show how much you're not trying to make believe you're not behind the times, it's to go around saying people are delightful."

The delightfully oddball friendship that develops is one in which the three engage in the kind of activities John and Lorraine have never experienced: visiting baboons at the zoo, shopping for exotic foods at Beekman's, roller-skating through department stores, playing pen-and-pencil shorthand psychology games meant to reveal one's true nature. It's a childhood compressed into a few months, one that John and Lorraine treasure: "One part of me was saying 'Don't let this nice old man waste his money,' and the other half was saying, 'Enjoy it, enjoy doing something absolutely absurd' — something that could let me be a child in a way I never could be with my mother, something just silly and absurd and...beautiful," thinks Lorraine. John has an even more violent feeling of protection:

"John, turn your radio down."
"John, you're disturbing your father."
"John, you're disturbing your mother."
"John, you're disturbing the cat."
"John, please do whatever you'd like. Make yourself comfortable. If you want something out of the refrigerator, help yourself. I want you to feel at home."
And always with a big smile so you knew he meant it.
That was the Pigman, and I knew I'd kill Norton if he tried to hurt the old man."

Yes, there is a bad thing, and it happens with Norton. You know how I am about the bad endings. But Lorraine and John aren't bitter at their parents—"My mom is a very pretty woman when she has her long brown hair down," Lorraine says, "and when she smiles, which is hardly ever. She just doesn't look the way she sounds, and I often wonder how she got this way"—but they do, as Lorraine says, wonder how they got this way—because if they could find out, maybe they could keep it from happening to them. There's an important scene in the middle of the novel where Lorraine observes an attendant at the zoo:

The thing that made me stop going to the zoo a few years ago was the way one attendant fed the sea lions. He climbed up on the big diving board in the middle of the pool and unimaginatively just dropped the fish in the water. I mean, if you're going to feed sea lions, you're not supposed to plop the food in the tank. You can tell by the expressions on their faces that the sea lions are saying things like "Don't dump the fish in!"

"Pick the fish up one by one and throw them into the tank so we can chase after them."

"Throw the fish in different parts of the tank!"

"Let's have fun!"

That's Lorraine and John, looking for any sign of life from the adults around them for whom they depend not only for nourishment, but for love, interest, smarts, play—any sense of joy in the world. It's not until they meet Mr. Pignati that they find it—and it's only after losing him that they realize it's up to them to create it again: "There was no one else to blame anymore—No Bores or Old Ladies or Nortons, or Assassins waiting at the bridge....Our life would be what we made of it—nothing more, nothing less." John and Lorraine want to avoid the crush. But their roller skates are gone, and it's just not certain that they can.

• • • • • •

First of all, MANY THANKS to all of you for your lovely notes and congratulations! MANY, MANY THANKS. I cried six times and had to go buy some really expensive luggage to collect myself. I am really looking forward to us having wonderful book worms together. (Also, Tumi is having a 40% off sale. I added 10% with a Bloomies card and 15% with a July 4th pre-sale for a grand total of 65% off their Tech Pulse line. I'm just saying.) I can assure you that, actually, every single book you all asked for is coming up in this column. For reels; I love those too. And for interested jezzies, I'm starting a mailing list for news and events and any other book-related info on the book I deem informational. If you would like to be on it, simply write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words SUBSCRIBE TUMI in the subject line, and I will put you on it.

Now, onto last week's Plotfinder, which related to a Suffragette, some forced-feeding, and a rape. After forwarding all the guesses to my querying friend, I received this missive:

I think THAT’S IT! I’ve just ordered it through Brooklyn’s interlibrary loan and will soon be able to hold it in my hands and know for certain is this is the long lost book! How exciting. Thank you! Will keep you posted.

xx a.

I believe it is too! Because I am too impatient to wait for Brooklyn's creaky library system to come through, and because I love the title, I am going to go ahead and give the win to Sue C. for Never Jam Today. Ah, why they did away with the lovely painted illustration covers, I will never know:

NEVER KNOW. Congrats, Sue! You know the drill: email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your column request.

I am also giving a bonus column request to commenter Eeva, who helped me out with A Long Day in November, which seems sadly out of print, like every other good book in the world. It is by Ernest J. Gaines, of course, a writer I have often enjoyed in adulthood! (At some point, maybe we can eke out a column on adult writers who wrote YA before they were trying to make all adult writers write for YA, so any intel on that, bring it on.) Eeva, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com and do with me what you will.

Now, onto this week's Plotfinder. I haven't shown a lot of international love in the column, so this one comes from reader Angharad C., writing from France and seeking something Australian:

I have a request for a novel that I'm almost 90% sure is Australian:

A girl from a poor loud screechy family who live in dirt poor part of town meets a girl at school who is very beautiful and put together. So perfect that in her lunch, her mother has put celery sticks in water so that they'll stay crisp while waiting to be eaten. The first girl looks on in envy at this one's perfect life, and decides she hates the beautiful girl. And of course, being a YA, they become friends.

Googling "Australian YA celery sticks" gets me nothing. The novel would have been written in the 70s or early 80s.

I am an idiot, and only learned that celery stick trick a few weeks ago. If only I'd had this novel in my youth! Good luck, everybody! As you know, answers go in comments or to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. First correct answer wins!

For your note-taking pleasure, coming up in the next few weeks:

Happy Endings Are All Alike

then

Stranger With My Face

then

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, for which my dear friend and amazing author Laura Lippman, who knows far more about the dark side of teen girls than I ever will, has agreed to guest!!! Which reminds me: time to get another novel in which a teen murders someone up in here.

The Pigman [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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

Lucky for me, I'll be helping out with the book in some as yet-to-be determined capacity, including but not limited to repeated demands that Lizzie include mention of my personal favorite and as-yet-to-be Fine Lined book, Harriet the Spy. As always, those with ideas, or simply congratulations to share, can reach Lizzie at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. And for those who want to see our entire collection of Fine Lines columns, click here.

Earlier: All Fine Lines Posts
Harriet The Spy: Iconoclastic, American Lezebel Icon

Related: Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

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 Jean Craighead George's 'Julie Of The Wolves,' which won a Newberry Medal in 1973.

I made an embarrassing discovery upon settling in for this week's reread: I had never, in fact, read Julie of the Wolves. (I'm not a complete fantasist—I do own a battered copy on which I or, far more likely, somebody else, drew large, looping lines with a pen.) I'm not totally surprised I thought I had, though. There's the whole "Noun of the Noun" issue (Summer of the Swans, Anne of Green Gables, Summer of My German Soldier) — but also just the preponderance of child-alone-with-animal(s) cover treatments (Sounder, A Day No Pigs Would Die, Zia, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Phantom Tollbooth, even Clan of the Cave Bear, which counts since I READ it as a child). Obviously, if I girl is striding around the landscape wearing Mukluks surrounded by creatures with fur that drool, I must have been in on it.

Miyax, "American" name Julie, is a young Eskimo girl who, after the death of her mother, was raised by her father, Kapugen, out in the wild, catching seals etc., until her father is drafted and aunt hauls her back to town to go to one of the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. As the author tells us, even Miyax's body is part of the landscape, as she's a "classic Eskimo beauty, small of bone and delicately wired with strong muscles....Unlike the long-limbed, long-bodied animals of the south that are cooled by dispensing heat on extended surfaces, all things in the Arctic tend toward compactness, to conserve heat."

As the book opens, 13-year-old Miyax has run away (seven sleeps, so far) from her husband Daniel, to whom she was affianced at the behest of her aunt. Her only hope for survival out on the tundra is a pack of wolves whom she may partake of kills with, if she can earn the leader, Amaroq's, trust.

Here she was, watching wolves—she, Miyax, daughter of Kapugen, adopted child of Martha, citizen of the United States, pupil at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School in Barrow, Alaska, and thirteen-year-old wife of the boy Daniel, watching wolves. She shivered at the thought of Daniel, for it was he who had driven her to this fate.

The fate in question has, for the first third of the book, quite a lot to do with becoming part of the pack, what various members of the pack do, and accumulating meat—for reasons I will get to in a second. And I will ascribe either to the fact that adults can't absorb tundra-porn like children or just that I am a bad person that I skipped mightily over these sections, just like I did the stuff about the healing properties of various flora in The Clan of the Cave Bear. I apologize, plotfinder winner! Here's an example just for the meat-lovers amongst us:

When in sight of her house she took a shortcut and came upon a pile of caribou droppings—fuel for her fire! Gleefully, she stuffed her pockets, tied a marker at the site for later use, and skipped home dreaming of owlet stew.

She plucked the birds, laid them on the ground, and skillfully cut them open with her ulo. Lifting out the warm viscera, she tipped back her head and popped them into her mouth. They were delicious—the nuts and candy of the Arctic. She had forgotten how good they tasted. They were rich in vitamins and minerals and her starving body welcomed them.

Treats over, she sliced her birds into delicate strips and simmered them slowly and not too long.

"Chicken of the North," Miyax gave a toast to the birds. Then she drank the rich juices and popped the tender meat in her mouth.

AND:

It was time to carve and eat! She cut open the belly and lifted out the warm liver, the "candy" of her people. With a deft twist of the ulo, she cut off a slice and savored each bite of this, the most nourishing part of the animal. So rich is the liver that most of it is presented to the women and girls, an ancient custom with wisdom at its core—since women give birth to babies, they need the iron and blood of the liver.

Candy, candy! (News for you ladies under 30—the closer you get to menopause, the more you DO want to take hunks of bloody liver and drop them, dripping, in your mouth.) But the novel picks up as we realize where Julie/Miyax is actually headed — to San Francisco, to meet with her pen pal, the white girl Amy Pollack, whose father works for the Bureau helping the Alaskans with the alcoholism that has followed the white people:

The many years in the seal camp alone with Kapugen had been dear and wonderful, but she realized now that she had lived a strange life. The girls her age could speak and write English and they knew the names of Presidents, astronauts, and radio and movie personalities, who lived below the top of the world. ... the wonders of Mekoryuk dimmed as weekly letters from Amy arrived. Julie learned about television, sports cars, blue jeans, bikinis, hero sandwiches, and wall-to-wall carpeting in the high school Amy would soon be attending. Mekoryuk had no high school. The Eskimo children of the more prosperous families were sent to the mainland for further schooling, something with Aunt Martha could not afford.

But after Miyax marries Daniel, he tries to rape her — and that's how she winds up with the wolves, back on the tundra, to the world of her early childhood with Kapugen, collecting caribou meat to have enough nourishment to make the long journey to her friend. But her journey is interrupted when Amaroq is killed by hunters who descend in a plane and shoot the entire pack. Riddled with grief, Miyax finds out that Kapugen, whom she had believed dead, is in fact alive, and has brought a struggling town back to self-sufficiency by teaching them to hunt, as he taught Miyax. She journeys first to the nearby town, knowing if she can just return to him, she won't need to go to Amy:

The big room was warm and smelled of skins and fat. Harpoons hung on the wall, and under the window was a large couch of furs. The kayak hung from the ceiling, and a little stove glowed in the center of the room. Kapugen's house in Kangik looked just like Kapugen's house in seal camp. She was home!

Not so fast. Kapugen's wife comes into the room, and Miyax realizes she's missed half of what she needs to see:

Miyax saw that her face was pale and her hair was reddish gold. A chill spread over her. What had Kapugen done? What had happened to him that he would marry a gussak? What was his new life?

Kapugen and his woman talked—she loudly, he quietly. Miyax's eyes when around the room again. This time she saw not just the furs and the kayak, but electric lamps, a radio-phonograph, cotton curtains and, through the door to the annex, the edge of an electric stove, a coffee pot, and china dishes.

Then she saw a helmet and goggles on a chair. Miyax stared at them until Kapugen noticed her.

"Aw, that," he said. "I now own an airplane, Miyax. It's the only way to hunt today."

...Miyax heard no more. It could not be, it could not be. She would not let it be...she opened the door and closed it behind her. Kapugen, after all, was dead to her.

I was recently discussing with a few friends why, in the books of earlier eras, all the children are orphans or somehow bereft of parental influence. There is the obvious explanation that this allows the child to interact with the world a bit more fully, but I think there's another reason. The child is not only interacting with the world, but serving as a symbolic bridge between cultures. Just as The Secret Garden's Mary is able to restore a corrupt household riddled with the spoils of colonialism to a stunning example of a lush England which nurtures itself from within, so Miyax is the bridge from the Eskimo ways to the new Alaska, a hybrid of native and white culture in which Kapugen still kayaks, but has a white wife and a plastic, not sealskin, coat.

Sadly for Miyax, her dream to "live with the rhythm of the beasts and the land" is no longer supportable. Not only are the "seals scarce and the whales almost gone," Kapugen himself has gone from an Alaskan hunter to a western one, using a plane to shoot animals that he doesn't even bother to collect. Perhaps he has killed Amaroq, the last hunter of the tundra, the one who has sustained his daughter in her time of need. As she tells us, that kill has turned Miyax's dream of flying to San Francisco into a "dream of fire and blood and death." The only thing left for her, and for Alaskan culture, is a bastardized version of their old way of life. Even her name is gone. As George writes, it's not Miyax who points her boots back towards Kapugen. It's Julie.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

Holy hell, you ladies NEVER cease to amaze me. So, the answer to last week's sister/greasepaint/pretty mystery was INDEED similar to "The....I want to say The Giver but it's not" in that it was The Leaving, by Budge Wilson. Winner is Lauren L., avowed lurker, by email. Lauren, you are clearly hiding your light under a bushel with this whole "lurking" action. You are, as Trump says, a winner. Or maybe that was Alec Baldwin in Glengary Glen Ross. Whatever, you have the right to tell me to do a column and no one can ever take that away from you. Write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your booty, or even put it in the damn COMMENTS! It will be good for your constitution.

This week's Plotfinder actually comes from a friend who is feeling poorly, and since her own stomach is rebelling I'd like to solve this particular related narrative. I'm recreating the oral request from memory here:

"Okay, so there's this girl in the 20s, and she's all out on the town, working, new job, having fun. Has a great boyfriend. He's gotta go off to the war. [So a little before the 20s. —Lizzie] She's loving her job, and somehow gets hooked up with the suffragette movement, Saratoga, the whole nine. She's marching. She's into it. THEN SHE LITERALLY GETS TAKEN TO JAIL, AND FORCE-FED. FORCE FED!!!!!!!! Then her boyfriend comes back. He's still great. And he's all about, when is the marriage happening, and she's actually like, you are terrific. But I choose me."

Ladies? Send your guesses and secure knowledge to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or leave the answer in the comments. First correct wins the chance to order me around.

I've got one more bonus Plotfinder, again from yours truly. This is an odd duck, since I'm fairly sure I'm remembering the title, A Long Day in Winter, correctly. It's about a young black boy over the course of one day when his parents, who are sharecroppers on a sugarcane plantation, separate. Early in the morning, his mother gets up with him to pee, then he asks for water, and she says, "Let it out and put it all in again, huh?" She gives him a bit of sugarcane when she's working in the fields, and his hands are cold. The mother and father rejoin again at the end, and the father's hands are strong and calloused from working in the fields. It probably took place in the 30s or 40s, and the cover is purplish with the boy and mother on it. ETC. Doesn't exist, as far as Google and Amazon are concerned. POSSIBLY by someone with first name of Brenda?

Have at it, in comments or to jezziefinelines@gmail.com.

You guys keep asking me to list next week's books! Hello! I DO THAT now. I know I am yelling at the wrong people if you have made it down here, but HELLO.

Next week is:

The Pigman

followed by:

Happy Endings Are All Alike

followed by...

Stranger With My Face!

If anyone has the "right" cover for Stranger With My Face, I'd appreciate a scan. it's quite rare—Lia is tall and semi-Native American looking, long dark hair, and actually looking at herself (but not herself!!!) in the mirror. My copy lost the cover a long time ago, which is of course psychologically devastating and something I think about probably once a day. Provider wins a mystery vintage text from my enormous, teetering collection.

Send pics, demands, guesses, and anything else you think I'd like to know to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I will take your emails and pull them from my inbox's abdominal cavity, saving the warm, rich liver for myself, because women get to keep the nutrient-rich liver because we have the babies; obviously no one cares if WE get effing nutrients.

Julie of the Wolves [Amazon]

Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 rereads 'Deenie', the 1973 story of a girl whose newly set back proves only a minor setback.

My mother named me Deenie because right before I was born she saw a movie about a beautiful girl named Wilmadeene, who everybody called Deenie for short. Ma says the first time she held me she knew right away I would turn out the same way—beautiful, that is.

Oh, how I wanted to look like the girl on this cover. She might be the only cover girl I ever wanted to look like, actually. (Those legs! That skirt! That SWEATER!) But kudos to the cover artist for catching that Deenie Fenner is that rare kind of beauty, appreciated both by her high-school-age peers and by modeling agencies in NY—and one of the few female characters to whom the reader might relate to exactly as the other characters do: with admiration, jealousy, and an involuntary sense of possession.

When we first meet Deenie, she's an ordinary high school girl, complete with a less pretty older sister, Helen, two best friends, Janet and Midge, a crush, Buddy Brader, and even an actual stalker, Susan Minton, who is given to wearing whatever Deenie wore last week. Her place in the social circle is secure if not exactly all-reigning, and while she by no means torments her inferiors, like the hunchbacked woman at the newstand, Gena Courtney, her wheelchair-bound neighbor, or Barbara Curtis, a new girl whose eczema Deenie privately calls "Creeping Crud," she's not exactly rushing out to sit with them at lunch either.

At home, her father—albeit affectionately—reacts to the events in Deenie's life with baffled, genial detachment: "I didn't make the cheerleading squad," "So you'll find another activity." But her mother has even greater plans for her—to push Deenie into a modeling career: "Deenie, God gave you a beautiful face. Now he wouldn't have done that if he hadn't intended for you to put it to good use." On her own beauty, Deenie's fairly neutral, treating it with admirable equanimity, and only a few qualms. When she's trying out for the cheerleading squad, "Most times I don't even think about the way I look but on special occasions, like today, being good looking really comes in handy. Not that a person has any choice about it. I'm just lucky." But when she thinks a little deeper on her mother's set roles for her and her sister Helen ("Deenie's the beauty, and Helen's the brain!" her mother crows to anyone who'll listen) a few fault lines emerge: "One thing I'm sure of is I don't want to spend my life cleaning house like Ma. Sometimes I think Helen's lucky. She'll be a doctor or a lawyer or engineer and she'll never have to do those things. But if I don't make it as a model, then what?"

Still, it's important to remember that Deenie's no Queen Bee, even though she's well-received in all the modeling agencies her mother totes her around to (despite the increasing complaints about her posture...foreboding, foreshadowing!!!). In another narrative Deenie might lord a recent trip to New York to see a modeling scout over her friends, but Deenie's a product of her present, not the future her mother sees for her:

When we go to Woolworth's Janet's the best at trying on junk without buying. You're not supposed to do that but Janet always gets away with it. The one time I tried on some nail polish the saleslady caught me and I had to buy the whole bottle.

"And we say Harvey Grabowsky," Midge said.

"You did?"

"Yes, we followed him all around the store."

"Did he say anything?"

"He never even noticed."

"Oh."

Harvey is the best looking guy in the ninth grade. He's also on the football team and President of his his class. Harvey has never said one word to me. I guess he doesn't talk to seventh-grade girls at all.

As soon as I hung up the phone rang again. It was Janet.

"We followed Harvey Grabowsky in Woolworth's," she said.

"I know. I just talked to Midge."

"Did she tell you what he bought?"

"No...what?"

"Three ballpoint pens and a roll of Scotch tape. And once I stood right next to him and touched his shirt sleeve!"

I just knew I'd miss out on something great by going to New York.

Yup, something great. Would have absolutely killed me to miss this, too, naturally. But the social drink of adolescence is like a delicate, primordial soup into which the introduction of a foreign agent can alter the composition forever, causing unexpected, irreversible roils in the resident organisms. Which is exactly what happens when Deenie—heretofore heading in a predictable evolutionary direction—finds out she has scoliosis. (Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, that is, or, in Deenie's words, "adolescent and something that sounded like idiotic.")

Suddenly, Deenie goes from having her photo snapped and practicing her walk in front of agents to having her X-rays taken and walking around in order for the doctor to better pinpoint her infirmity. It's portfolio to pathology, a narrative parallel I did not fully appreciate pre-Masters Degree. Even Deenie's new doctor doesn't respond to her in the predictable ways she's used to, as he examines her and she checks out the photos on his wall:

"Were you a good football player?"

"I was fair," he said. "Are you interested in football?"

"I'm not sure. I don't know much about it yet. I wanted to be a cheerleader, but I didn't make the squad."

He didn't say anything about that. I thought he would. I thought he'd say "Well, you can try again next year" or something like that. Instead he said, "Bend over and touch your toes with your hands, Deenie."

No more cheerleading, no more modeling—and no more "you'll find another activity." Instead, it's a race to figure out what activities the new, highly unimproved Deenie actually can do, and who's to blame for the situation:

In the car, on the way home, Ma told Daddy, "Your cousin Belle had something wrong with her back....remember?"

"That was different," Daddy said. "She had a slipped disc."

"But I'll bet that's where this came from."

"I don't think so," Daddy said.

"Because you don't want to think so!" Ma told him.

I wanted them to stop acting like babies and start helping me. I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home—all that stuff Dr. Griffith had been talking about—that I didn't understand. Instead, he and Ma argued about whose fault it was that I have something wrong with my spine until we pulled into the driveway. It was almost as if they'd forgotten I was there.

And in a way, Deenie is not there anymore. (Also: Ah, marriage.) As the doctor marks her plaster cast with a felt pen to show the braceman where he should put the straps, he might as well be marking the spot in the narrative where Deenie must also fit herself into a new role—finding out what's beneath the pretty face that was masking whatever was underneath. (Gimme one post-Masters moment of meta: when Deenie is cut out of the cast, she even finds that her body stocking has disappeared, leaving her nearly naked, a babe born into a new life who runs immediately for the closet, because it is also freaking mortifying to be naked in front of two doctors. Anyway, thanks! I'll try to keep these to a minimum.)

It's also no coincidence that the first thing Deenie does when she gets home is masturbate, an operation I am not ashamed to admit went right over my head at age 8: "I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling. I don't know what it's called or if anyone else has it but when I have trouble falling asleep, touching my special place helps a lot." Deenie does have a private life, and private desires—and soon more socially acceptable ones will also be made manifest. (Deenie, by the way, other people have it! I have it! And I now understand you were NOT talking about your toe!)

The first step is breaking free of her mother:

The brace looks like the one Dr. Kliner showed us three weeks later. It's the ugliest thing I ever saw.

I'm going to take it off as soon as I get home. I swear, I won't wear it. And nobody can make me. Not ever!...I had to fight to keep from crying.

Just when I thought I was going to be okay Ma started. "Oh, my God!" she cried. "What did we ever do to deserve this?" She buried her face in a tissue and made sobbing noises that really got me sore. The louder she cried the madder I got until I shouted, "Just stop it, Ma! Will you just stop it please!"

Dr. Kliner said, "You know, Mrs. Fenner, you're making this very hard on your daughter."

Ma opened the door and ran out of Dr. Kliner's office.

Daddy hugged me and said, "I'm proud of you, Deenie. You're stronger than your mother."

And it's not only that she's stronger—her outward manifestation of difference makes Deenie realize she really is different, not only from what everyone thought of her, but what she thought of herself. "It was hard to believe I really had something in common with Old Lady Murray," Deenie thinks, looking at an illustration of kyphosis, hunchback-ism, with the nurse showing her what her own spine looks like. She's handed a form for the handicapped bus, throws it away, then wonders if her neighbor thinks of herself as a "handicapped person or just a regular girl, like me." She stops worrying about Barbara's creeping crud and being her gym partner after Barbara nicely ties her shoes in gym, since the brace makes it impossible to lean over anymore to do it herself. (Cry-line alert: "When she told us to choose partners Barbara and me looked at each other and grabbed hands." SOB, SOB.) But, sporting her new brace at school, she has her best insight when faced with the avatar of her old standards, Harvey Grabowsky:

When Harvey saw me he asked, "What happened to you?"

He would be the only one in school who didn't already know. "I have scol..." I stopped in the middle. I didn't feel like explaining anything to anybody. Instead I looked straight at him and said, "I jumped off the Empire State Building!" After I said it I felt better. I usually think up clever things to say when it's too late. From now on, when people ask me what's wrong, I'm going to give them answers like that. It's a lot smarter than telling the truth. No one wants to hear the truth. "I jumped right off the top!" I forced myself to laugh.

"Oh, Deenie!" Janet said. "Tell him the truth."

"I just did."

"Hey, that's a good story," Harvey told me.

It is, and it's a much better story than the story her mother had planned for her. After her mother pushes out Helen's boyfriend, coupled with Deenie's brace, the entire beauty and brains scheme comes crashing down in one epic sob scene:

"Oh Ma...you're impossible! Ma didn't give me a special brain. You made that up. And you almost convinced me, Ma...you almost did.... I used to tell myself it didn't matter if I wasn't pretty like Deenie because I have a special brain and Deenie's is just ordinary....but that didn't help Ma....it didn't help at all....because it's not true!"

Helen turned around and looked at me. Then she did the craziest thing. She ran to me and hugged me and cried into my shoulder. "It's not your fault, Deenie...don't let them make you believe that...it's really not your fault."

I started crying too. Helen doesn't hate me, I thought. She should, but she doesn't. We both cried so hard our noses ran but neither one of us let go of the other to get a tissue. And right through it all, Ma kept talking. "I wanted better for you," she said. "Better than what I had myself. That's what I've always planned for my girls...is that so wrong?"

SOB. Um, excuse me. SOB!!!!!!!! But how wonderful that this is not a simple comeuppance story, since it would have been so easy for Blume to make this a tale of the conceited beauty who gets brought low by her own flaws. (ALSO: BLUME IS A GENIUS.) Deenie's not conceited, she's just passive—a very minor flaw that, as Blume knows, in the long run can have far more dire results than excessive self-regard (which, unfortunately, kinda works in one's favor). Ironically, it's Deenie's brace that frees her from the invisible brace her mother was setting up for her, an adolescence locked into a role that would have derailed her growth as a real person. The plastic, with its collar and straps, chafes, but it's a minor cage—and, unlike the cage her mother had in mind, one Deenie can emerge from with her standing intact.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

Now, for the winners of our double-header Plotfinder! You ladies are awesome. Onion-soup bath was, of course, In the Beauty of the Lilies. I mean, Where the Red Fern Grows. I mean, Homecoming. Where the Lilies Bloom!!!!!! That's it! I knew you'd get to it eventually, although I enjoyed all the associative variations, especially when they were delivered with such decisive, wrongheaded aplomb. ("IT IS WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS!!!!!!!!") Wait until you start making mental leaps likeThe Trumpet of the Swan into The March of the Wooden Soldiers, and we'll talk.

The winner, by LITERALLY ONE MINUTE, was commenter Nellicat. Congrats, N! Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize.

For our bonus Plotfinder, which actually came from me, because this is my column and it was driving me CRAZY, the answer is, of course, Dear Lola: Or, How to Build Your Own Family.

I had this cover:

THANK YOU.

Unfortunately, Jezebel is only showing up to 100 comments for old posts, and I am therefore unable to double-check if a commenter got it before Erin H., whose correct answer dinged into my inbox at 5:09 pm. If the comments ever come back and someone had it earlier, you get a win along with Erin. Oy, you guys. That's like 19 of you with the power to choose. CHOOSE WISELY!

This week's Plotfinder comes from Kate M., and is actually from a collection of short stories. (I will go off on the interesting collections of short stories quite a few YA authors published another day, as the last time I did that my friend and I just wound up trying to remember the plot of Roald Dahl's "The Swan" from memory and just wanting to end it all.) In any case:

So there's this collection of short stories that I read in 6th grade, and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the book, but I can tell you that I think it had a lavender-ish cover with a girl on the front looking wistful and windblown... I think it was entitled "The _____" and my brain keeps wanting to to say "The Giver", but it's so not.

Anyway, there was one short story in there that has stuck with me for 15+ years, and it's about these two sisters. The narrator has brown hair and is sort of roundish and gets straight A's, and is the star of the school play, and her sister (I feel like her name was Carrie or Hannah or something like that) is skinny and waify and "always looks like she's waiting for something". Anyway, the waify sister ends up helping with the dominant sister's school play, and as a reward for being a good helper, the teacher puts makeup ("greasepaint") on her face, and then all of a sudden everyone realizes that the waify sister is gorgeous, and after that moment, everything changes. The smart, dominant, pudgier sister still gets straight A's and is the president of every club, but now the waify sister is constantly surrounded by boys, and no longer looks like she's waiting anymore.

I loved that story, and I would love to reread it, but I can't remember the name of the book! Do you have any idea?

As always, enter in comments or by email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. First correct answer wins a column choice.

Speaking of early Alzheimer's, ladies, you are not keeping enough of an eye on your arthritic old columnist. (Except for calling me on mixing up limburger and liverwurst, which is unprecedented.) I actually skipped clear over an earlier winner's pick I'd announced, Happy Endings Are All Alike, by Sandra Scoppettone, which has lezebelarism AND sexual assault, though not simultaneously. I apologize. To give interested readers time to procure it, we'll stick with the already scheduled Julie of the Wolves next week—and, lest we be ever awash in sexual assaults, introduce The Pigman in between. If I deviate from this at all, feel free to run crying from the room immediately, sobbing about what you've done to deserve this.

Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 rereads 'A Wrinkle In Time', Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel of Meg Murry, who is too young to have wrinkles.

It was a dark and stormy night.

If I had my way, none of us would have to read this review at all. Instead, we'd join hands, hear a great dark thunderclap, and be whisked off to a rambling house in the country, where we'd view odd things bubbling in a lab with a stone floor, then eat limburger-and-cream-cheese sandwiches while swinging our legs at the kitchen table. We'd sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes, then be inserted into some mitochondria. We battle for the soul of Madoc /Maddox, and eat small crayfish with our lesbian kind-of aunt who insisted on calling us our full name (Polyhymnia). We'd hop on a freighter and solve a mystery, then go to boarding school in Switzerland. We would make a brief detour on the Upper West Side by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We'd be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. Most important, whatever happened, we'd know we could get through it—because we are creatures that can love.

GOD, HOW MUCH DOES IT KILL ME THAT WE CAN'T DO THOSE THINGS, ESPECIALLY THE DOLPHIN PART! But, as Mrs. Who would have us recall Dante saying, Come t'e picciol fallow amaro morso! (What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!) For here we are finally, located at the miraculous creation of Meg Murry (Madeleine L'Engle: Das Werk lobt den Meister! The work proves the craftsman!). Meg, the first heroine to endear herself to the reader by way of atom rearrangement.

For those readers who don't know—and I can't imagine there are many, but just for the record—A Wrinkle in Time is the story of Meg Murry—bespectacled, easily angered, brilliant at math—the first in a line of L'Engle heroines who flit across the boundaries of space and time, even more flummoxed by adolescence than they are by being whipsawed across the universe. (Which they are generally, just to complicate things, in the process of saving.) In AWIT, Meg, joined by her neighbor (and future husbs!!!) Calvin O'Keefe and her quietly remarkable younger brother Charles Wallace, hop-stops her way through a number of only occasionally hospitable galaxies, searching for her father in the shadow of the Dark Thing, the shadow of evil threatening to overtake Earth, and all of creation.

And that's it for those of you who haven't read the book. (Just stab me in the eye; it's less painful.) For the rest, first off, I am embarrassed to say that, swooning over memories of red-tinged, Sloppy Joe brains and calm, fragrant creatures with dents for eyes (Aunt Beast!), I had entirely forgotten that, when we first come across the studious, brilliant, Murray family, they—and Meg in particular—are in somewhat of a crisis. Not only has Meg just gotten into an enormous fight, black eye included, on the way home from school with some boys teasing her about her “dumb baby brother,” but her father is missing—a fact which the town is only too happy to snidely remind her of. Here's Meg with her school principal, sullenly hating life in the hall:

"Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?"
"I do face facts," Meg said. "They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you."
"Then why don't you face facts about your father?"
"You leave my father out of it!" Meg shouted.
"Stop bellowing," Mr. Jenkins said sharply. "Do you want the entire school to hear you?"
"So what?" Meg demanded. “I'm not ashamed of anything I'm saying. Are you?"

Am I the only one who'd forgotten that Meg has a) a bad attitude and b) is therefore, as yet unbeknownst to her, kind of a badass? Unfortunately for Meg, at that age, being a badass feels closer to, “I hate myself and would like to die." As the novel begins, alone in the bathroom, Meg tells her cat, "Just be glad you're a kitten and not a monster like me," then looks in the mirror and makes “a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with braces.”

The problem for Meg is that, like Vicky Austin, she is surrounded by people who know exactly who they are. First are her younger brothers: “The twins didn't have any problems....They were strong and fast runners and good at games, and when cracks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren't made about Sandy and Dennys.” Then there's her mother, who's both beautiful, kind, and a brilliant scientist. (Meg snorts at the idea her mother's looks or accomplishments are ordinary, although her mother, also enragingly modest, assures her they are.) Youngest brother Charles Wallace may have issues on the vast social stage of their country town ("Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to be smug about"), but only because being brilliant, psychic and self-assured before reaching 5 feet never plays well on the playground. (FYI, Charles Wallace is the only preternaturally wise child I've ever been able to stand, in literature. Maybe that's why I can't stand the other ones—they're NOT Charles Wallace.) Even their neighbor Calvin O'Keefe, who Meg thinks of only as a popular, well-adjusted basketball player, only pretends to be—he, like Charles, is both bright and highly attuned to unseen currents.

Meg, on the other hand, is all flyaway hair, braces, irritation and uncertainty—not ordinary enough to be popular in school, but not quite the extraordinary being Charles Wallace is. (As Charles Wallace puts it, "Meg has it tough. She's not really one thing or the other.") When she's hears someone say, "The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren't all there," there's no more coherent rejoinder than her flying fists.

But Calvin O'Keefe, whose unabashed affection for Meg marks the beginning of her transformation, dispatches this whole line of inquiry neatly. "Oh, for crying out loud," Calvin said, "you're Meg, aren't you? Come on and let's go for a walk."

I'm sorry. I'm going to need to just swoon for one second over Calvin:

Tall he certainly was, and skinny. His bony wrists stuck out of the sleeves of his blue sweater; his worn corduroy trousers were three inches too short. He had orange hair that needed cutting and the appropriate freckles to go with it. His eyes were an oddly bright blue.

Loving. Him. LOVING HIM! (Zach and Adam, Shmach and Adam.) Anyway, enough backstory. As you know, Calvin has been brought on the scene at the request of Mrs. Who, one of three mysterious old women who have arrived in order to help the Murrys retrieve their father, who has not, as the family knows perfectly well, gone on the lam with a beautiful woman, but obviously been stuck in a high-tech jail on a galaxy far, far away. But in order to get there, they are going to have perform the act that landed Professor Murry in trouble in the first place—engaging in a tesseract. (Is the tesseract the object or action? Whatever.) As Mrs. Whatsit unhelpfully explains, "Oh, we don't travel at the speed of anything....We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle."

I'm going to need some visuals on that! Okay, imagine an ant crawling on a piece of string. Now, imagine the string is a skirt!

Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together. "Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said. "He would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel."

Exactly! Sort of. Charles Wallace begins to quiz Meg on dimensions, just to bring the reader even further up to speed. Meg, if the first dimension is a line, the second a square, the third a three-dimensional square in which we live, then what's the fourth dimension?

"Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you'd square the square. But you can't take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it's got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you can call the fourth dimension Time."

That great whooshing sound you hear is the noise of 10 million readers deciding to just go ahead and be English majors. In any case, having tesseracted, 5th dimension style, of course, Meg's father is not simply lost—he is imprisoned by the great brain of the Dark Thing, a shadow stretching over the entire universe that is also starting to creep over Earth, the children are horrified to see. And in order to release him, the children are going to have to travel to Camazotz, where he's being held, the planet where the forces of evil have coalesced into a dreadful reign of conformity:

Then the doors of all the houses opened simultaneously, and out came women like a role of paper dolls. The print of their dresses was different, but they all gave the appearanceof being the same. Each woman stood on the steps of her house. Each clapped. Each child with the ball caught the ball. Each child with the skipping rope folded the rope. Each child turned and walked into the house. The doors clicked shut behind them.

What's fascinating about L'Engle is how in her world, courageous action is never simply swashbuckling, and it's unlikely anyone but a bookworm who couldn't conform if she tried could stand up against the forces of evil. In the first few chapters of the book, the reader is introduced, in no particular order, e=mc2, megaparsecs, Peru, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Euripides, Delille, and a host of other terms with which your average 12-year-old is rarely familiar. As the children watch the Dark Thing encircle their planet, they are relieved to realize that there have been heroes fighting against it throughout history, heroes they can name: Jesus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Pasteur, and Madame Curie and Einstein. The children resist being hypnotized by the forceful brain, IT, holding their father captive by reciting the periodic table, the Declaration of Independence, and doing the square roots of odd numbers. And when Charles Wallace is fully pulled into the brain of IT, Meg holds it off on her own simply by having an insight:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident!" she shouted, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As she cried out the worlds she felt a mind moving in on her own, felt IT seizing, squeezing her brain. Then she realized that Charles Wallace was speaking, or being spoken through by IT.

"But that's exactly what we have on Camazots. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike."

For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. "No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"

This is absolutely apropos, since Meg, Charles and Calvin, are, of course, not like their peers, and not like the world in which they live—but they are far more than equal, if it comes to that. And is this regard, Mrs. Who has also provided Meg with a far more important weapon against IT, one that not even Calvin or Charles Wallace have:

"My faults!" Meg cried.

"Your faults."

"But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!"

What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was to her faults that she turned to save herself now.

And because she's able to resist IT for long enough out of pure orneriness, she's able to remember what it is that she has that those in conformity, both at home and on Camazotz, can never take away from her:

Her own Charles Wallace, the child for whom she had come back to Camazotz, to IT, the baby who was so much more than she was, and who was yet so utterly vulnerable.

She could love Charles Wallace.

Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them.

Now she was even able to look at him, at this animated thing that was not her own Charles Wallace at all. She was able to look and love.

I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you, I love you.

...Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms. He was shrieking with sobs. "Meg! Meg! Meg!"

Well jeez, now I'M crying. But I find it fascinating and instructive what role KNOWLEDGE plays in courage in A Wrinkle in Time, where Meg, who has been castigated by her math teachers by not doing their problems her own way, discovers that her stubbornness about what she knows is right is her greatest strength. It's not really her love for her brother that saves him and her father and herself from being taken over by the Dark Thing. It's her faults (anger, impatience, stubbornness) that keep her from being sucked in by the great throbbing brain telling her to fall in line. Because Meg's bullheadedness—her insistence on doing things her own way, her understanding that she is probably right, her anger at the attempts to silence her—isn't simply a cute narrative depiction of a spunky girl. She's not spunky, she's difficult. And, as unattractive as those traits are to others, Meg's faults amount to no less than a belief in herself. And, as Mrs. Who says: Justitae soror vides—faith is the sister of justice.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—

As usual, you ladies have done me proud. The solution to last week's Plotfinder, which involved streaky lemon pie and bad hair, was, of course, Candace F. Ransom's Fourteen and Holding. (Just FYI, for the record, I hope you all know I never print Plotfinders that I, MISTRESS OF FINE LINES, know or can recall. So you are doing all this excellent work yourselves.) The winner, by literally FOUR MINUTES, by email, was one Rita D. Congratulations, Rita! As you will recall, winners get to choose an upcoming Fine Lines; Rita, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize.

Now, for this week's Plotfinder:

I swear I read this book dozens of times — including as an official class assignment in the 5th grade — so I can't believe I've completely forgotten its name. It's about a family of orphans (naturally), I think five of them. The book is from the point of view of the second-oldest daughter as she tries to hold the family together after their grandmother dies. They try to hide the fact that their grandmother died from all the neighbors, and make ends meet by going up into the woods and collecting wild herbs like digitalis that they sell to people from the city for money. They have an evil landlord named Keyser Pease, and at one point they have to save him from dying from a horrible disease by putting him in a bathtub full of fried onions. (I still have no idea what that was about.) The eldest daughter, who is described as "cloudy-headed," ends up falling in love with the evil landlord and they get married, which saves the family from being evicted.

I don't think this is The Boxcar Children. (In case it is, just be like THE BOXCAR CHILDREN DUH, LIZZIE.) Just for insurance purposes, however, I'm going to add my own Plotfinder that's been bugging me this week, which is also about orphans. I'm going to ital myself too so I don't feel alienated from you all:

What's the book where a family of foster children, led by an older, now of-age foster child, runs off when they are about to be separated because the youngest is about to be adopted? They are super-on-the-lam all the time. The oldest guy is kind of nice. At some point after their first escape they pick fruit in California. There's some issue of cards on construction paper being written to absent parents. There's also a haunted house with peeled grapes for eyes where they're almost caught and have to move yet again. The youngest boy (of course) has a lisp and probably carries around a blanket, and I believe there's a quiet, genius black child (of course) whose computer skills become useful at some point. And a young hispanic boy who likes...skateboards? Can this be? He's obsessed with something boy-ish that is provided to him on Christmas, perhaps. They buy a house at some point, and are allowed to stay together at the end.

You can answer in the comments below, or send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. First correct answer(s) win. (Yes, this week there is the possibility for two wins!) Winner(s) get(s) to demand a column, nicely or intemperately, however so they choose. In any case, I will be sure to bring all your answers to life and wrap them in fur after you freeze and pass through the Dark Thing, however snatchy the forces of evil have made you.

Next week's reading! Reach for your special place...we are going to do Deenie, followed the next week by last week's Plotfinder win request, Julie of the Wolves.

A Wrinkle In Time [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Love is One of the Choices', Norma Klein's 1978 novel of close encounters of the first kind.

It's a good week to talk about Love, because it's all about Love, apparently! But if I can point my finger accusingly and just say something to you, Michael Patrick King: long before your days of funky-tasting spunk, there was a New York where women and girls stalked the pavement talking ceaselessly of sex and relationships, chewing over their minutiae with little attention to anything else, set against a sea of Manhattan sophisticates, men totally did too, and they did it without drinking any Cosmopolitans whatsoever! And oh yeah, I curse the day you were born.

I am talking about the world of Norma Klein and her vanished Upper West Side, made up, if you assess the author's oeuvre in its entirety, almost exclusively of intelligent private school girls, their semi-inappropriate lovers, and their equally semi-inappropriate parents, whose love struggles develop alongside those of their daughters as they both sort out male-female relationships in a confusing era. It is a world of academics with rent-controlled rambling Morningside Heights apartments with African masks on the wall, absent French documentary filmmakers dads, people getting their PhDs in Columbia, Jewish girls and their non-Jewish BFFs, nude sketchers, and passionate tennis players, all of the above having inappropriate encounters, eating bagels and coffee for breakfast, and talking about it all.

If this sounds (minus the African masks) something like a Carter-era Gossip Girls, let me assure you it is nothing like a Carter-era Gossip Girls. What's so wonderful about Klein, in fact, is how free the world she created was of artifice or camp in the least. (It certainly shared enough signifiers with my childhood that I was always wondering why some old professor wasn't offering to sketch me nude while telling me important things about life.)

Love is One of the Choices is not, as it happens, a YA novel (booksellers threw up their hands and put all Klein in the YA section, which is how I chanced upon and obsessively reread Give Me One Good Reason, where a woman happily becomes a single mother by one of her two lovers and names her son Bruno), but it's certainly the story of two teenage girls' sexual coming-of-ages, so whatever. Maggie is a intense, practical girl, tall and good in science, far more blunt than her best friend Caroline, who is artistic, blond, and a little dreamy. I'm just going to reproduce word-for-word their sociological particulars, because Klein did it best the first time:

Caroline liked the idea of people having happy marriages. Her own parents had been divorced when she was one and a half and she rarely saw her own father more than once a year. although he was American, he had lived in Paris and made documentary films there since the divorce. Unlike Maggie, she loved babysitting, precisely because it afforded her a glimpse into the private lives of other people. She loved homes where everything was a little chaotic and noisy, where the children tumbled around, yelling, where the parents hugged each other and said funny, intimate things without thinking about it. It was so unlike the quiet, organized predictable life she led with her mother, a specialist in antiquities at the Parke-Bernet Galleries. Maggie, too, came from what their sociology teacher at Whitman would have called a "single-parent family." Her mother had died of cancer when she was nine and she lived in a rambling West Side apartment with her father, a plump, fifty-year-old Freudian psychoanalyst. But while Caroline was always intensely and painfully aware of not coming from a "regular" family, Maggie seemed either not to notice or to actually feel that being different was kind of an advantage.

I could actually read that kind of Flaubertian character delineation all day, and when you read Klein, you basically can, as the novels mainly consist of said depictions, then the results of various character pairings and attendant ricocheting off. The pairings in question involve Caroline's with Justin Prager, Maggie's mentor and science teacher of both, and Maggie's with Todd, a boy she meets at a debate match. YES, THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID THEIR SCIENCE TEACHER. Guess what else—not so scandalous, in the 70s! Whatever, here's their first sex scene:

When he was inside her, she felt a sense of triumph, as though finally they were equals. She had gotten him here, she had seduced him, so it seemed to her. And now he couldn't go back, he would have to love her. She was sure, based on nothing at all, that he was loving her, that as they moved together it was more than fucking. She let her hands move over his body, feeling amazingly reckless, almost drunk.

"Darling," he said. He had called her his darling.

...Even without coming, the feeling of him as he came made her almost weak with joy. His body was glazed with sweat. She hugged him close to her, fiercely, wanting him never to withdraw, to say in her forever.

And then she totally falls for him and he throws her over at the end and she has to get an abortion, right? Well, no. But hold on, Maggie's about to lose her virginity too:

It now seemed too planned out. It was certain, Maggie decided gloomily, setting the table—Todd was coming to dinner with her and her father—to throw a pall on things. She had already inserted her diaphragm thinking that when the moment came she might be too nervous to get it in right. Even now she wasn't quite sure. That very evening she had put it in and taken it out half a dozen times, like a woman rearranging her hairdo before deciding it looked best the way she had done it the first time. She wondered if you were supposed to feel it. She was acutely aware of it inside her and wondered if that meant it was not where it was supposed to be. They said if a man felt it, he didn't like the feeling. Well, that would be Todd's problem; she had enough to worry about.

And then SHE gets pregnant and has to have an abortion and he leaves her to sleep with all kinds of other girls because he's a young man, right?

Again, no. They all stay together, actually. But not because Klein is an optimist of a fantabulist—but simply because as an author, she's more interested by what happens when people stay together than the various reasons a woman might be left (planning too big a wedding? Not finding latte foam funny?) and the wreckage thereafter (paging Jennifer Hudson and some takeout Chinese!).

It's not that Klein's heroines have no struggles as they make their way through their first relationships: Watching Justin ignore her in the halls of school, Caroline fantasizes about smashing her hand through the glass, and Maggie grimly compares a husband doling out a budget to a wife to a slave owner. But the men of her novel are not enemies, inherent fuckups whose main role in the narrative is to woo, then humiliate, then be forgiven and buy stuff. They're equal partners as capable of receiving pain and giving it, no less perplexed by their own desires and vulnerabilities.

I have no idea what a post-post-AIDS-era readership would make of Klein, who neither ironizes nor slickifies her girls' coming of age, but merely gives them a kind of psycho-sexual freedom absolutely unheard-of nowadays. (Maybe in Iceland? Greenland?) Their unfettered, if not uneventful, exploration of love seems both innocent and wholly revolutionary today, when sex is packaged by Wall Street, Hollywood, Bertelsmann, and the DSM-IV into some reconstituted mass that may or may not be good for you. So, what if we did live in a world where a father could come home to the apartment and genially inquire if a boyfriend was sleeping over, then be happy he was, since he'd wanted to make some more political points? What if we lived in a world where you could tell your mother you were about to move in with your science teacher, and she decided it was okay, since your best friend spoke highly of him? What if all we had to fear were the hearts we'd break or the hearts we'd take? Oh if, oh if, oh if.

• • • • • •

Good lawd. Lots of correct answers to last week's Stardust Hotel/Teddy Bear/Ferris Wheel fiasco, and it is NOT, as I dared dream, Ray Bradbury, but, of course, Into the Dream, by William Sleator. I say of course because I trust the opinion of the hive mind, of course, and not because I have read it, because of course I have not. Now I will, for God's sake. And the winner! by a *hair*! at 2:43 pm by gmail! was one Erin W. Congrats, Erin! Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your winner's column request.

Now, for this week's Plotfinder, which comes from reader Hilary S, and which I ALSO can't remember goddamnit!:

A girl in high school:
has a friend who wears orthopedic shoes;
sneakily opens her presents early because she thinks the girl-bully is
going to kill her before Christmas;
cuts her own hair into a stylish geometric haircut, forgetting that unlike
the popular girl in school, her hair frizzes when it's dry;
makes a lemon-meringue pie in home ec class without separating the eggs,
so the pie's all streaky.

That would make it into many major poetry journals of the day undetected, I think. As always, send guesses either by email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com or leave them in the comments. Use the same email to send column requests and unselfconscious musings about love and diaphragms—in verse, if the mood strikes.

I think it's time for a heavy hitter for next week's column. Vale! We will be doing A Wrinkle in Time, mofos (I know, it makes me nauseous with love too!!!), followed the next week by Plotfinder winner Rhadika's lezebel-ready request, Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike, which is GREAT, if you haven't read it, and please do so if you want anyone around here to have anything to do with you at all.

One more thing: This week on a business trip to Baltimore, I stopped in on my old friend Russell Wattenberg at The Book Thing, a free book donation organization that gives away tens of thousands of books a week to those who need them and those who are just greedy, like me. As it happened, they were sorting new YAs on the floor, and I made off with approximately 78,000 UNFINDABLE classics, or three enormous boxes' worth, YES YOU ARE JEALOUS, for Fine Lines. Like How to Eat Fried Worms and everything. If you would like to repay this karmic debt to this column by giving them some cash or donating some old books yourself (NOT YOUR YAs BUT OTHER BOOKS), the Fine Lines gods will thank you. You also might want to think of taking a pilgrimage down there to eat crabs and snag your own 79,000 copies, although I would give them both a few weeks to replenish.

Thanks to author Alyson Noel at Teen Fiction Cafe for the cover scan.

Love Is One Of The Choices [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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 wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'The Girl With The Silver Eyes', Willo Davis Roberts' 1980 book about a girl in search of silver-eyed bookworms.

One of the most anxiety-provoking aspects of Fine Lines is the pre-post search for what I can only define as the "right" cover — meaning the one on the book when I read it. (This obsession ranks only slightly below the plot and is hastily abutted by the font. Why does everything have to get re-flowed into Bembo? What's wrong with Caslon?) Now, since as of last week, I've fetched my vast, antique collection of YA works out of storage (did I worry they'd die in a fire? Do you have to ask?) I am happy to say that certain key covers are again WITHIN MY GRASP and will be PROVIDED TO YOU IN DUE TIME.

This is all to say, however, that, as a champion squirreler, I am rarely in the position of having my memory happily jogged by the cover photo. (And seriously, does anyone have the right A Gift of Magic?) BUT NOT SO WITH The Girl With The Silver Eyes, which many of you had mentioned in the comments! This work fell out of my possession in the early 80s, and all I could call up was some dim memory of a factory and an apartment complex with brown balconies overlooking a pool. (There 'tis!) But what reams of crucial essentials had been forgotten! Those calico Clark Kent glasses! That white-ringed tee! That man's groceries tending skyward on their own! How it is fun to make things move, just by thinking about them!

You will recall that Willo Davis Roberts, among the other 987 books she published, also wrote Don't Hurt Laurie — which has a scene of young Laurie, wearing rollers, being beaten with a hairbrush and knocked out against a bathroom sink by her mother. The Girl With the Silver Eyes is not nearly that dark, although it does have Grimmsian intimations about the sorry fate of children at the hands of adults. Luckily, in this case, Roberts has given our heroine, the polyester-orange snappily knife-creased Katie Welker, a weapon against them — not only the aforementioned silver eyes, but their handy corollary: telekinesis, and the ability to know what animals are thinking.

When we first meet Katie, her grandmother Welker has just died, and she's been returned to the custody of her mother, Monica — living in splendor in the apartments you see picture