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

• The long-awaited "all black" issue of Italian Vogue hit newsstands, and we gave you a guided tour.
• Judy Blume taught us that having your dessert isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're a disgruntled 60s housefrau.
• We became your personal style guru.
• Three words: dolphin assisted birth.
• See little Emily walk. See little Emily run the fuck away from George Bush.
• We wanted to run screaming from Today Show bungler Ann Curry.
• Speaking of loathsome tv personalities, it was a big week for Elisabeth Hasselbeck! She told us she has never used a vibrator and cried during a discussion of the N-word.

• We shared our dirty desks with the world.
• We discussed chick lit and Maxi with author Janelle Brown.
• Times of London essayist said: incest is best put your brother to the test. We said: do not want.
• We reminisced about advertising icons and proposed a few updates.
• This week marked Dodai's one-year Jezeversary, so pour some out for our Hello Kitty-lovin' editrix this weekend!

It's time for another edition of 'Shelf Pleasuring', an occasional feature in which we revisit the sexiest books we stole off our parents' shelves when they weren't looking. Today, Fine Lines proprietrix, blogger, NPR book reviewer and filthy-novel-fiend Lizzie Skurnick writes about 'Wifey', Judy Blume's 1978 novel about having your cake...and getting it eaten out, too.

Can someone please explain this five-course, multiple orgasm thing to me? I don't mean this exact second, you can read the review first, but at the end of this exegesis I would like a few people to enter the comments and iterate the exact circumstances under which one would be able to claim one had enjoyed "Breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack." (I myself am not hungry, per se, but, having never been sure if I've personally taken part in the all-day buffet in question, I need to know if I should request a complimentary voucher or something.)

The source of the question in question is one Sandy Schaedal, a housewife in Plainfield, NJ, flush in the middle of late 1960s Jewish suburbia, wherein which the children of hardworking, Depression-era parents are suddenly experiencing all that club memberships, trips to the Bahamas, open marriages, and browned chicken from Elegant but Easy cookbooks can add to the quota of human happiness.

When we encounter Sandy, she's just recovered from a serious bout of classic debilitating housewife hysteria, and is at the end of her rope with her husband, Norm, the upright, uptight owner of a chain of a dry-cleaning stores. Norm is the kind of tidy husband who asks Sandy to keep track of his dog's "sticks" and "wees," likes his (browned) chicken on Wednesdays and his sex on Saturdays, and chooses to retire to his side of their twin beds every night, joined only by one headboard:

One bed for Norman, with cool, crisp sheets, preferably changed twice a week, not that he didn't want fresh ones daily...and one bed for Sandy, where, once a week, on Saturday nights, if she didn't have her period, they did it. A Jewish nyphomaniac. They fucked in her bed, then Norman went to the bedroom to wash his hands and penis, making Sandy feel dirty and ashamed. He'd climb into his own bed then, into his clean, cool sheets, and he'd fall asleep in seconds, never any tossing, turning, sighing. Never any need to cuddle, or laugh quietly with her. Three to five minutes from start to finish. She knew. She's watched the digital bedside clock often enough. Three to five minutes. Then he'd say, "Very nice, did you get your dessert?"

"Yes, thank you, dessert was fine."

....She's learned to come in minutes, seconds if she had to, and she almost always made it twice. No problem there. She almost always got her main course and her dessert. But usually it was a TV dinner and Oreo when she craved scampi and mousse au chocolat.

Conjured up like some priapic avatar of her most unseemly desires, Sandy has of late been haunted by an odd type of ghost, who conforms to his kind only in that he, too, sports a white sheet (hospital variety). Briefly, there is a man who drives up on her lawn with a motorcycle wearing a Stars and Stripes helmet who masturbates on the lawn, then departs with a wave. (Norm's comment after the first incident: "The motorcycle: Did it leave ridges in the lawn?")

Naturally, this cannot stand, but Sandy's life simply as the mother of two children, Jen and Bucky, who are now away at camp, has left room for the kind of whole rampant for over-examination, both mental and physical, that needs to find its outlet somewhere — which it has, in a raging itch that's taken over her nether regions. Asked by her brother-in-law, a gynecologist (no comment), about whether or not it might be psychosomatic, she replies, "I don't think I can discuss it with you, Gordon....I don't think I could discuss the subject at all."

Except, of course, with the reader:

My sex life? Oh, you mean my sex life. Yes. Well. Let's see. Ummmm, if you want to judge it strictly on the basis of orgasms it's fine. Terrific. That is, I masturbate like crazy, Gordon. You wouldn't believe how I masturbate. God, I'm always at it. Driving here, for instance, this morning....driving, get that, in traffic, no less....not, not the Cadillac, Norm took that to work. The Buick...driving the Buick...I hear this song on the radio...from my youth, Gordy, like when I was seventeen or something...Blue velvet, bluer than velvet was the night....it reminds me of Shep....and I get this feeling in my cunt....this really hot feeling....and just a little rubbing with one hand...just a little tickle, tickle on the outside on my clothes...just one-two-three and that's enough...I'm coming and I don't even want to come yet because it feels so good...I want it to last. And guess what, Gordy? I never itch after I come that way. I itch only after Norman. So, you see, it must have something to do with him. Maybe I am allergic to his semen...maybe I'm allergic to his cock...maybe I'm allergic to him!

But Sandy isn't only chafing at Norm, but her good-housewife place in the late-60s culture as a whole, which is erupting into all kind of nasty itchings and burnings, both racial and sexual. Unbeknownst to Norm, a stalwart member of the Young Republicans, Sandy has actually voted for Kennedy, for whom she sits shiveh to Norm's consternation, tossing sheets over the mirrors in the house. ("Jesus Christ, now you're going Orthodox?") When, at the urging of her traditionally good-looking, well-adjusted sister, Myra, the couple joins the area's exclusive Club, Norman immediately joins the Grievance Committee and kills on the tennis court while Sandy struggles through golf lessons, idly fantasizing about Roger, the club's golf pro and only black face on the scene, noting that the only part of the lesson she enjoys is when he stands behind her and wraps his arms around her to show her how to hold the club.

She also has very little in common with Myra's friends, who radiate health and wealth in equal proportions, in contrast with her sickly, uncoordinated, secretly sex-craving self. At one of Myra's parties, meeting her tennis-playing buddies, Sandy gets embroiled in a conversation about moving from increasingly black Plainfield to willfully white Watchung:

Sandy thought she might like Funky, with a bandana tied around her head, loaded down with Indian jewelry, best, until they got into a discussion about Plainfield.

"Plainfield, my God!" Funky said. "I thought Plainfield was all black."

"Not quite."

"You mean not yet! If I were you, I'd get out while the going's good and move up to the Hills....In Watching you could send them to public school. We have only two black families in town and both are professional."

"It's really not a racial thing," Brown said, joining them. "It's more of a socioeconomic thing, don't you think?"

"Yes and no," Funky said. "Yes, in the sense that professional ones tend to think more like us and want what's best for their children. No, in the sense that they're still different no matter how hard you try to pretend they're not. I mean, put one in this room, right now, and suddenly we'd all clam up." She took a cheese puff from the tray offered by Elena, the black maid. "Thank you."

Sandy is no social revolutionary, but she's also not particularly invested in her own upward mobility — and therefore not invested in keeping others down. She's not about to join the Black Panthers — her sense of injustice is far more internal, a mordant irony that she only expresses to herself. (Remembering how the one time Norman tried to give her oral sex he had to gargle with Listerine for a half an hour, she quips to herself, "That's why I douche with vinegar...cunt vinaigrette...to make it more appetizing...you know, like browned chicken.") However, in the days where feminism ("Women's libbers," to Norm, "Dykes who want to be on top") is located only in encounter groups in a Manhattan that may as well be 2000 miles instead of 20 minutes away, Sandy has only her fantasies to rebel with—until they slide, as it were, very easily into reality.

Her first affair is with her brother-in-law, Gordy, and not very much on purpose. At one of Myra's blowout parties, Sandy goes into a room to rest and finds herself assailed by a very drunk Gordy, who is endearingly straightforward: "I've always wanted you, Sandy....always loved your little ass....your cunt....every time I examine you I want it....want to kiss it...to fill it...." Her second is with Shep, the boy she didn't marry because her mother never thought he'd go anywhere. "You can't eat handsome!" Actually, Mother, you can, Sandy thinks, remembering:

Still, she dreamed of Shep. She dreamed of kissing him there and over midwinter vacation had a sudden urge to take him in her mouth. What was she going to do about these disgusting thoughts? Decent people, normal people, didn't do those things...didn't even think about them. Shep was perverted. But she let him do that to her. Just once. And oh, it was so good. Like nothing she had ever experienced. She came over and over, as he licked and kissed and buried his face in her. Until she cried, "Stop...please stop...I can't take any more..."

And then he kissed her face and she tasted herself on him. And she liked it.

Sandy's fantasies—and subsequent affairs—aren't because she's a nymphomaniac, but rather, because she's trying to resolve the two things about Norm she can't reconcile: his liking for the rigid class code of the club, and his liking for an equally rigid sex life, where his irritation with Sandy's needs, his inability to give love, leaves her, appropriately enough, irritated: ("Norman, do you love me?" "I'm here, aren't I?") Gordy, sister-in-law-fucker though he may be, is not a pervert — he's just as depressed with the code of the Club as Sandy is. ("You know something, Sandy, I hate this fucking house, this stupid party.") And though Sandy would like to convince herself that she would have had a very different life with Shep, she finally has to admit that it would have entailed the same things as her life with Norm — the Club, kids, car pools — and their same deadening effects.

The flap copy calls Sandy "a very nice housewife with a very dirty mind," but in fact, she's neither. Sandy, cosseted by a life of leisure that's become a straightjacket, buffeted by fucking on the brain, is very, very normal. "So where did things go wrong, Norm?" she thinks, lying in bed. "So what happened? Comfortable. Safe. We had our babies. We made a life together. But now I'm sick....And I'm so fucking scared!...Oh mother, dammit! Why did you bring me up to think this is what i wanted? And now that I know it's not, what I am I supposed to do about it?"

It would have been very easy to make Norm the enemy here, and, truthfully, the husband who rants about woman's libbers, who tells Sandy she doesn't know how good she has it, then responds to her entreaty that she could get a job with, "Your first duty is to make a home for me and the kids. After that, you want a little part-time job, it's fine with me" is grounds for massive enragement.

But after Sandy gets gonorrhea and has to tell Norman about her affairs, she finds a cache of letters written from an ex-girlfriend in the attic:

She had a sudden desire to call Brenda, to ask her what Norman had really been like way back then. Because she could see now that there must have been another Norman. A Norman who dreamed of becoming a biologist...of saving the world. A Norman who loved intensely. Could that Norman still be locked inside the Norman she knew, just as another Sandy was inside her, struggling to get out?

You bet your ass! In fact, America of 1970 is a nation of Norms, struggling to reconcile their golf shoes with riots in Newark. At age 8, I'd never noticed the epigraph to the book, a quote from Good Times by Peter Joseph. "In terms of affluence," It reads, "America in the 60s reached a stage that other societies can only dream of," it reads. It's no surprise that the mystery masturbator wears a Stars 'n Stripes helmet. Wifey isn't a novel of raunch — it's a novel about two Americas, the old 50s model and the long-haired, 70s edition that suddenly need to resolve Sandy's greatest complaint: "Paying isn't caring, Norman."

But, you know what? Caring is caring, and that's what Norman and Sandy find out they both do. Shattered by Sandy's betrayal, Norm doesn't throw her out but instead makes a surprising offer: "We could get a double bed. I know you've always wanted one." (He also agrees to try oral sex after being told by Sandy "I think you have to develop a taste for it, Norm, like lobster.") Surprisingly, Sandy hasn't gone mad on her bed in a room of yellow wallpaper. She's made several beds, and she's lain — not lied — in every single one. God Bless America.

Wifey [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]
Earlier: The Clan Of The Cave Bear: Where The Wild Things Are

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 wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself', Judy Blume's 1977 story of Sally Freedman, who, following WWII, spends a year in Miami and triumphs over Hitler and Man O' Wars.

"Such big eyes!" Ma Fanny said, laughing. "You still have half a sandwich left."

Okay, everyone, quick poll: raise your hand if, after V-Day, you want your brother to get sick with nephritis so your dentist father can send you, your mom and your bubeh from NJ down to Miami for the winter to help him get better and you can go to school in a trailer and bike around being afraid that your neighbor, Mr. Zavosky, is Hitler, while you get your braid tugged by a boy you only later figure out you like and your grandmother calls you "mumeshana" and you dream of your dead cousins, Lila and Tante Rose, killed in the Holocaust, and you drink cocoa with whiskey because you're trying to make the creme de cacao your Mom drank in Cuba, and then you get stung by a Man O' War and complimented by said brother on being braver than he thought and catch Virus X and eat two bowls of chicken with rice soup, then try on some toe shoes.

For those who didn't do last week's assigned reading (or, you know, read the preceding paragraph), Blume's wondrous near-autobiography is the story of one Sally J. Freedman, whose father (dubbed neither my mistaken last week's "Dodo-bird" nor "Dooey-bird" but in fact "Doey-bird") moves the rest of the family from N.J. to Miami after the end of the war for one year when Douglas, the older son, needs to recover from a bout of nephritis. Thus ensconced in the Sun Belt with her mother and Ma Fanny, Sally embarks on a series of adventures that only another girl could understand are true adventures, including getting nits, having a friend fall on a bike, getting stung by a man o' war, washing diamonds with a hotsie-totsie in the Ladies Room, having her neighbor get knocked up by a goy, and discovering her neighbor is Hitler.

You might note from one of those that Sally is also given to vast flights of fancy, which, given the times, wend to spy missions in Europe and captures of Hitler — who has, in fact, killed her cousin Lila and Tante Rose, her grandmother's sister, both gassed in Auschwitz. Sally's triumphant narrative:

Sally F. Meets Adolf H

It is during the war and Sally is caught by Hitler in a round-up of Jewish people in Union County, New Jersey...He orders the Gestapo to bring her to his private office. Tell me, you little swine, Hitler hisses at her. Tell me what you know and I'll cut off your hair.

...Sally shakes her head. I'll never tell you anything...never!

So Hitler goes to his desk and gets his knife and he slowly slashes each of her fingers. She watches as her blood drips onto his rug, covering the huge swastika in the middle.

Look what you've done, you Jew bastard, Hitler cries hysterically. You've ruined my rug!

Ha ha, Sally says. Ha ha ha on you, Adolf....And then she passes out.

When she comes to, Hitler is asleep and snoring with his head down on the desk. Sally crawls out of his office, then dashes down the hall to the secret passageway of the underground. She gives them valuable information leading to the capture of Adolf Hitler and the end of the war.

It seems impossible to write about Starring Sally J. using a straightforward plot synopsis, because, like some glorious dish of kreplach, its mighty stuffing of detail exists in a symbiotic relationship with the soup of the plot. (As we have previously covered, frontiers, English manor homes, and the 40s somehow lend themselves unswervingly to that old detail porn, a fact for which PBS must be very, very grateful.) Instead, you hear about curtains being run up on sewing machines and you can't help but be transported right into Sally's apartment, with its Murphy bed and courtyard fountain with goldfish, and in the kitchen you sit, being spoken to by Ma Fanny entirely in Yiddish, reverse-syntax English and ellipses. There's your grade-school teacher Miss Swetnick over there, with her heart-shaped glasses and chipped tooth, and there's your Sunday at Herschel's, with just a little cherry juice on top. That's the ring on your four-party phone (one long ring, followed by two short), and there you are in the grade school bathroom pulling down your Esther Williams-esque coronet to make Margaret O'Brien braids and stuffing your white socks into the garbage to look more like the girls in Florida and not the ones in NJ. (And hoping God will forgive you this one time when the starving children in Europe could probably — right? — use those white socks.)

But I wonder if another reason we swoon for Sally J. is that, as readers, we were very much at the same level of detail comprehension — not only in our real-world lives, but in our reading of the book itself. After all, not only did I also have no idea what an "addition" or "Creme de Cacao" was (though I too tried to approximate it with Hershey's and whiskey) I also was ignorant of so many of the ready references of Sally J.'s world that she understood perfectly well: Jolly Rodger, dog tags, "Swells", Esther Williams, Margaret O'Brien, open-sided pinafores, Admiral Halsey. (To be perfectly honest, I still have no idea who Admiral Halsey is.) Any goyim must have been even more ferblondzet!

Pre-Wikipedia, I of course only realized who Esther Williams was years later, and some of the scenes — like that Ma Fanny borrowed Sally's English book to practice English and THAT'S why it was in the pantry — I just realized now (I am slow). But even as an eight-year-old, I understood that Sally realizing Peter Hornstein liked her, or that she was more adventurous than her mother, was a great leap forward for my beloved character. And though, at age 8, I may not have known yet who Eva Braun was, or where Union Woods could be found, I knew when Sally made peace with the fact that, probably, Hitler was not running amok in them, I too could set aside this childish dream.

Still longing for a finished basement, though!

• • • • • •

Now, for this week's Plotfinder winner: Congratulations, one Gillian B., who slid in with the correct answer, O.T. Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City, pretty much *as* the post was posted. (Do you know, I've actually never read that one? Whatever—have you read The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids? That's what I thought!) Congratulations, Gillian—write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your column, any column.

This week's Plotfinder comes from reader Allison, who sent me a great many Plotfinders, all of which we will get to eventually:

Theres also one about a little girl, and a little girl witch lives in the abandoned house next door. She flies her broom into the bushes I think, and climbs into the window. She eventually turns herself into a turtle, and goes to school with the non-witch girl. The turtle-witch girl sneaks off, into another classroom with younger kids, and ends up in the cafeteria eating out of a big jar of strawberry jam.

Is it just me or do the Plotfinders increasingly resemble head trips? In any case: Send your answers, as always, to jezziefinelines@gmail.com, or post below in the comments. First correct answer gets their favorite pick in an upcoming Fine Lines.

And, finally. I have heard around the way that some Jezestrelles would like to know the books ahead of time. Oy! All right. I'm also finally cracking to reader pressure—WITH the provisional caveat that I may change my mind periodically or, you know, forget. I mean, I'm the person that has a shopping bag with things to return to Target that I forget EVERY TIME I GO TO TARGET, even when I'm going there to return them.

With that, next week's book will be The Girl With the Silver Eyes, followed by Plotfinder winner Sarah R.'s request: Norma Klein's Love is One of the Choices, followed by some TBR blockbusters in June. Happy Half.com! (And by the way, if you NEVER read Klein, I recommend going whole hog on whatever is there, especially Sunshine.)

As always, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com with your demands, observations, remonstrations, and Man O' War remembrances.

Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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

Judy Blume v. Censors [Current TV]
Earlier: Then Again Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes And Think Of Jersey City

Her daughter wanted something more, Blume explains:

She had read several novels about teenagers in love. If they had sex, the girl was always punished — an unplanned pregnancy, a hasty trip to a relative in another state, a grisly abortion, sometimes even death. Lies. Secrets. Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual.

Judy Blume's Lessons In Love [Telegraph]
Related: Judy Blume's Blog [JudyBlume.com]
Earlier: Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
Were You a Judy Blume Enthusiast or a Babysitters Club Nerd?

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 re-reads Judy Blume's 1971 novel 'Then Again, Maybe I Won't', which helped many a young girl learn about hard-ons, wet dreams and the downsides to sudden wealth and suburban Long Island.

Thank god the phrase for "wet dream" is the same in England. I say this not out of any allegiance to Royalist nocturnal emissions, but because I'm using the English edition of this book, and have been thus saved a harsh repeat of my 7-year-old initial read: namely, not knowing what the hell Judy Blume was talking about.

In fact Judy Blume, at least for me, required an unholy amount of pre-Wikipedia diagram and explication. I still remember well — WELL — porting my instantly well-thumbed copy of... YES, WAIT FOR IT...Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret (you'll have to provide the clash of trumpets here yourself) over to my mother to ask her what a "period" was...

[your own memory here]

...and she fixed me with a beady look, picked up the book and looked at the back cover, then nicely provided me with a diagram of a sea-skate-esque uterus, including attendant ovaries and a path-of-egg line resembling those of the "Find Your Way Out" maze games I was fond of playing at the time. (This led, I know see, to an undue amount of anxiety until the actual cycle occurred.)

And it didn't end there. Other "Show, Don't tell"-inspired queries: Deenie ("Do I have scoliosis?"), Tiger Eyes ("What are 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy'"?), Starring Sally J. Freedman, As Herself ("Who is 'Esther Williams'?"), Blubber ("What does 'Tu me manques beaucoup' mean, and can I have a French tutor?"), Iggie's House ("Judy put a black person in her book YAY!!!!"), It's Not The End of the World ("Are you When are you getting divorced?"), Forever (Actually, I was FINE on this one, except for the "hard" part, which had already presented a great difficulty in the book we are dealing with today).

Anyway, leave it to Judy Blume to make the story of a priapic boy [redun.-Ed] who requests a pair of binoculars to spy on his next-door neighbor heartwarming. (Unrelated: Michael Chabon did this with stories about bearing the offspring of a rapist and molesting a child in Werewolves in Their Youth, and I've always wondered if he set that as a goal. Blume, as we all know from Wifey, is just straight-up deviant.) Written in the years before being working-class was considered a virtue, Then Again, Maybe I Won't is the story of one Tony Miglione, Jersey City resident, lover of basketball, younger sibling of Ralph — who's a teacher and lives upstairs with his wife, Angie — and Vincent, who died in Vietnam. Son of Vic ("Pop"), Carmella ("Ma"); grandson of Grandma ("Grandma"), who does all the cooking and cannot speak, because she has no larynx, which doesn't creep Tony out because he loves her.

The "crisis" in the novel — Shoutout to Creative Writing Workshop, 1992! — occurs almost immediately, when Angie gets, insofar as one can, inadvertently pregnant. (I'm going to go out on a limb and assume, due to the presence of several Father Pisarros in the narrative, that she and Ralph are using the rhythm method.) Pop, heretofore a general contractor, also goes out on a limb and sells some electrical cartridge thingie to a businessman named J.W. Fullerbach, which immediately gives the family the means to move out of Jersey City to the leafy environs of Rosemont, Queens. (Literally a deus ex machina! Shoutout English 125a, 1991!) Before he knows it, Tony has been transplanted from playing basketball at the Y with characters named Big Joe and Little Joe to hanging out with his polite, shoplifting neighbor Joel, who has an inground pool, a hot older sister, and a mother who calls Tony's mother Carmella Carol because it's "easier."

On reread, I'm most struck by how Blume manages to make this novel of class neither cutesy nor polemical-but only about a very singular character's growth during a certain profoundly charged time. This character can be experienced so fully that the reader, I don't know, BURSTS INTO TEARS at the local coffee shop-having forgotten the primary peculiarity of even a happy childhood that Blume depicts so well: That for this brief window, one is subject, for the better or worse, to the machinations of almost every adult in one's life.

Meaning one might get yelled at for not putting the paper under the mat on one's daily route. Meaning one might lose said route and move to a new town next door to a rich kid who makes prank calls from his parents' bedroom, which has a circular bed on a pedestal, and this STRESSES ONE OUT. Meaning one's mother might insist on one's calling adults "sir", pick up lint from the new carpets constantly, and acquire a maid that usurps one's grandmother's role such that she secretes herself in her bedroom except to visit one's brother's grave. Meaning one's dad might buy a new car because one's neighbors notice the truck and ask if one is having work done on the house. One might have erections constantly and have to carry a raincoat or a stack of books at all times to conceal one's condition, and one might lie to one's parents to ask for binoculars for birdwatching, then use them to watch the older girl across the way undress. One might become an uncle, be forced to take piano liessons, decide everyone's a phony, go ahead and let one's friends get caught by a security card and sent to military school. Pretty much everything might STRESS ONE OUT so much that one might get terrible stomach pains out of anxiety and eventually wind up in the hospital, after which one's dad, cutting one a break, would prevent one's mother from imitating the neighbors and sending one to a military academy as well-and one might come into one's own enough (heh) to put the binoculars away.

OMIGOD I AM TIRED OF SAYING "ONE". But anyway, what can I say? Tony is one of the most wonderful pilgrims ever to progress through the YA landscape, even more poignant because — and men who read Jezebel, speak up — I *think* this is kind of an accurate depiction of how teenage boys actually think, right? Yes? Woe betide us, yea, verily, stuck in the sad, sad end times where the only woman allowed to write about teen erections is Caitlin Flanagan.

Then Again, Maybe I Won't [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Were You A Judy Blume Enthusiast Or A Babysitters Club Nerd?
•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
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan

So, we're curious. What kinds of books did you guys love as kids? And also, isn't that picture of Judy Blume really hot? The woman is pushing 70! Writing about masturbating teens must be amazing for your skin!

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Well-Insulated 'Little House' [Washington Post]
Judy Blume's Official Website [Judyblume.com]