In a juicy profile, New Yorker's Rebecca Mead goes inside the behemoth teen taste-maker Alloy, a sort of sinister junior Clear Channel that's responsible for much of the YA bestseller list, including the multimedia Gossip Girl and Traveling Pants juggernauts and, more lately, The Vampire Diaries. And do we ever see the pink, undead, bratty sausage being made! Here's how Mead describes the efficient hit-factory:

[Alloy] pack-ges about thirty novels a year for publishers, and also generates television shows and a growing number of ideas for featurefilms. In order to do all this, Alloy has developed a process with an industrial level of efficiency. Ideas are typically suggested in weekly development meetings and, if they gain the approval of Morgenstein and Bank, are fleshed out into a short summary by an editor. A writer is asked to create a sample chapter on spec; if Alloy executives are happy with the sample, they put her (or, on occasion, him) on contract. The writer hashes out a plot with Bank, one or two other editors, and Sara Shandler, Alloy's editorial director-an alumnus of Seventeen, who, at the age of nineteen, put together the anthology "Ophelia Speaks".

It's always kind of creepy to see unabashed marketing at work, and especially when it's aimed at an impressionable age-group, however lucrative. Of course, cash-in teen-lit has a long pseudonomynous history, from Nancy Drew to Sweet Valley. And the Alloy execs would just say they're giving kids what they want. One Alloy exec defends it thusly: "Editors and publishers can get hung up on what's good for kids...At Alloy, they always think first about what kids want to read." Which, of course, isn't always - or indeed, ever - an improving tract. And the idea that the body of literature informs and shapes said nascent tastes, paving the way for a lifetime of dutiful buying - well, that's conveniently ignored. Yes, kids want candy and Easy-Mac: because they've seen ads designed to attract them. Not because it's what's best for their development, or some genetic imperative of childhood.

Sure, some of the series sound really interesting (I really want to read the second "Wish" book that they map out in the piece), and the Alloy execs say we're moving away, culturally, from the excess of "brat lit" into Twilit territory because "more serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit." And some of the book are even of historical interest! Mead mentions a new novel about
"a boy who acquires superhuman powers after being tortured during the Civil War." Then there's the new gilded-age Gossip-Girl-esque series, the cover image of which Mead describes:

The result is a look that no woman in the Gilded Age would have been immodest enough to wear beyond the boudoir or the brothel, though the Alloy team felt that the sartorial anachronism was entirely forgivable (much like the heroine's request for "ciggies"-slang that would take another sixty years to emerge). "Girls today would not relate to the more severe necklines and covered arms and horrible hair styles that girls were wearing at the time," Sara Shandler says. "We tried to do the imaginary-princess version." Or, as one of the publishers competing for the book described the gown, "the ultimate fuck-me prom dress."

And there, of course, is the rub. There's a continuing belief that kids can't relate to anything unlike themselves. Richer versions of themselves, 19th Century versions of themselves, maybe magic versions of themselves - but the feeling seems to be that kids are such incredible narcissists that any truly expanded horizons are more than they can handle. And the problem, of course, is that it's self-fulfilling. The other day I passed a poster at the bus stop bearing a still from the new Where The Wild Things Are movie. "Read," it ordered - seemingly without irony. Alloy would totally agree.

The Gossip Mill [New Yorker]

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

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

Good luck!


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


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

Roiphe may be a little off-base with her claim that "until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds" — when I was in middle school in the 90s, there was definitely a series of YA books about terminally ill kids. And in Francesca Lia Block's now-embattled 1997 novel Baby Be-Bop, the main character is beaten by a gang of gay-bashers. But Roiphe is correct that many recent bestsellers deal with sorrow, suffering, and terror: there's Wintergirls, about a girl's gruesome battle with anorexia and cutting; If I Stay, in which a girl must decide whether to live or die after a car crash kills her parents; and Hunger Games, about a reality-show-cum-battle-royal in which only one teen will survive. Are these books shock lit, designed to sell copies through misery and gore? On the contrary, says Roiphe, their popularity just speaks to how difficult it is to be an adolescent. She writes,

[T]he extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives. Your whole family may not have died in a car wreck, but it sometimes feels like they have. Everyone in the school cafeteria may not be plotting to kill you with bows and arrows, or knives, or mutant killer insects, but it feels like they are. In the theater of adolescence, with all the sturm and drang of separating from parents, with the total stress of just having to be yourself in the hallway at school, perhaps these books feel, at times, like a true and reasonable representation of daily life.

I once got to a talk by a linguist with who was developing a program to teach reading in inner-city schools. He said a big problem with the stories kids were assigned was that they were too happy — they didn't reflect any of the difficulties the kids actually faced in their lives. The idea that kids and teenagers always need to be protected or distracted from the hard things in life — or that, as Baby Be-Bop's detractors seem to think, keeping books out of kids' hands will keep them in the dark about sexuality, prejudice, and violence — is a false one. Children understand, from a pretty young age, that life can suck, and literature that acknowledges and comments on this is going to speak to them a lot more clearly than fluff about birthday parties and shopping.

Of today's popular YA books, Roiphe writes, "these investigations of personal disaster are much less depressing than the Gossip Girl knockoffs which initially seem frolicky and fun but are actually creepy and morally bereft and leave you feeling utterly hopeless." It sound harsh — and there's nothing wrong with a little escapism from time to time — but characters dealing with difficult circumstances are actually a lot more hopeful and inspiring than characters who never have to deal with anything.

It Was, Like, All Dark and Stormy [Washington Post]

Much of the book could certainly trigger a vulnerable reader. It tells the story of Lia, who spirals into anorexia and cutting after the death of her best friend Cassie, who was bulimic. Like many anorexics, Lia knows how many calories are in everything she eats, and her descriptions of her meals ("I eat ten raisins (16) and five almonds (35) and a green-bellied pear (121) (= 172)") could certainly serve as instruction and motivation for disordered eating. So could her reports of her steadily dropping weight and ever-lower goal, the pro-ana websites she visits (though, thankfully, Anderson doesn't include actual web addresses), and the tricks she uses to make her family think she's eating. Most disturbing, though, is the way Lia thinks about her illness and her recovery. Anderson writes,

[The doctors] are morons. This body has a different metabolism. This body hates dragging around the chains they wrapped around it. Proof? At 099.00 I think clearer, look better, feel stronger. When I reach the next goal, it will be all that, and more.

Goal number two is 095.00, the perfect point of balance. At 095.00, I will be pure. Light enough to walk with my head up, meaty enough to fool everyone. And 095.00, I will have the strength to stay in control.

At 090.00, I will soar. That's Goal Number Three.

To the non-sufferer, this thinking is distorted and scary, but to anyone with a tendency toward anorexia, it may sound all too reasonable. Lia's thoughts about herself may be far more triggering than her calorie-counting or meal-avoiding strategies — they may convince girls that their own disordered thoughts are normal or even correct.

Some have argued that the book's triggering qualities are mitigated by how terrifying its portrayal of anorexia and bulimia is. Jack Martin of the New York Public Library told the Times, "It's so horrific I don't think anybody would pick this book up and consider it a manual." It's true that the manner of Cassie's death — a ruptured esophagus caused by her bulimia — is incredibly disturbing, and that the deeper Lia descends into anorexia and cutting the more she feels self-loathing rather than strength. But a Times commenter says, "it doesn't matter if you describe the 'horrors.' i'll read right past it and go for what i want," and this may be true for many sufferers.

The real reason Wintergirls is a worthwhile book isn't that it will scare people away from eating disorders — it might do the opposite. It's that Anderson offers insight into a difficult subject, one that is much-discussed but frequently misunderstood. Especially strong is her treatment of Lia's family. While at first it's tempting to think that Lia's parents' divorce "caused" her eating disorder, the book ultimately resists such easy conclusions. Lia's mother, father, stepmother, and stepsister all come across as complex characters who influence Lia for both good and bad, and whose relationships with Lia will all be important as she begins her recovery. Anderson renders anorexia as a complicated disease with many interrelated causes, but she also emphasizes the importance of family in Lia's treatment — both these messages are worth sharing.

Cynthia M. Bulik, director of an eating disorder program, may have the best take on the book. She told the Times, "Books such as these should be read with careful parental supervision. In the best of all possible worlds, this could be a conversation starter between parents and teens rather than a dark world that teens enter alone reading the book in isolation." Read without discussion or supervision, Wintergirls could indeed be triggering. But read as part of a conversation — or, perhaps, read by parents and other family members — the book could help make some teens' worlds a little less dark.

Wintergirls [Amazon]
The Troubling Allure of Eating-Disorder Books [New York Times]
Skin and Bone [New York Times]

Earlier: Are Teen Girls Really That Fragile?

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 '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

[Lots of spoilers follow.] First there's heroine Bella's willingness to marry her vampire lover Edward, even though it means becoming a vampire, leaving behind her family, and sacrificing any hope of a normal life. Then there's her pregnancy. She conceives during the honeymoon, and although she's never wanted a child before, she immediately falls totally in love with the green-eyed baby boy she's sure she's carrying. "I wanted him like I wanted air to breathe," Meyer writes, "Not a choice — a necessity."

This creepy antiabortion allegory quickly gets literal, as the half-vampire fetus (actually an interesting metaphor for any pregnancy) starts killing Bella from the inside out. Even as it breaks her ribs and sucked the life from her, she proclaims, "I won't kill him." But does she have to face the consequences of this choice? No, because vampire magic suddenly allows mother and father to hear the fetus's thoughts, and to discover that it already loves them!

Edward telepathically tells it not to hurt its mommy, and while he does end up having to bite it out of Bella's body with his teeth, everything is again fine because he uses more vampire magic to heal her wounds. Because she is now a vampire, Bella is even hotter than she was before pregnancy, and after a short recovery period she's able to have all-night sex sessions with her husband while the extended family takes care of the perfectly behaved, telepathic baby. In the Breaking Dawn universe, teen motherhood just makes your life rad.

All this radness is made possible in part by the idealized relationships all the vampires and werewolves have. Gone for the most part is the sexy rapacity of Dracula; gone is the fine long tradition of gay vampires. These vampires mate for life, and they mate straight. Werewolf love, meanwhile, involves imprinting, which can happen at any age. The werewolf Jacob imprints on Bella's baby — who turns out to be a girl — giving her a "promise ring" when she's only a few months old. Basically these mythical creatures live in a very safe, heteronormative world — and a boring one.

This is actually the book's biggest problem. It's 754 pages long, its heroine's dominant personality trait is low self-esteem, and, as Amazon reviewer Eventide points out, nobody really has to give up anything. Even the tedium of immortality is glossed over — these vampires just keep busy with their hobbies. If I had an eternity to read, I still might never pick up this book again.

Breaking Dawn does seem to be promoting a fundamentally conservative ideology. But then so does The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and they will pry that book from my cold, dead, godless fingers. I think ultimately we shouldn't worry too much about what ideas young adult books promulgate. We should worry about whether the books themselves are awesome. Because awesomeness promotes thinking, and thinking promotes becoming the kind of adult we all want more of in the world: the kind who can understand the message of a book — or a movie, or a blog post, or a presidential candidate — and decide for herself whether she agrees.

Breaking Dawn [Amazon]
Big Week For (And Big Reactions To) 'Breaking Dawn' [Publishers Weekly]
All Fangs, No Bite [Guardian]

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 '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 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

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 'Summer of My German Soldier', Bette Greene's 1973 book about Patty Bergen, who fears her father more than an escaped Nazi.

What can we say about a Jewish dad who beats the hell out of his daughter? It is not, to say the least, the common literary conception of "Jewish Dad" found in most old-school YA, where, when Tate is in evidence at all, he is generally a hardworking sort stamping down rags and letting his children choose books from his store, or a kindly dentist dubbed "Dodo bird" by his adoring daughter. (Do your reading for next week, ladies!) In fact, excepting stepfathers, genuinely beastly fathers are rare in YA: while they run the gamut from switching their daughters to make a point (oh, Pa!) to calling them fat and useless, I can't think of any other instance where one whips off his belt to beat his daughter by the side of the road...before he even knows she's sheltering a Nazi.

But then again, a Jewish girl who shelters a Nazi during WWII is not your standard fare, either. Patty Bergen, Jewish daughter of the South, is the actual daughter of Harry and Pearl Bergen, who own Bergen's Department Store in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, as well as the older sister of Sharon, who, though far younger, in generally agreed to be the more beautiful and well-mannered sister. It is not enough that, as a member of the only Jewish family in town in the 1940s, Patty is already barely tolerated among her Baptist peers. (Being the kind of precocious word-lover that reads the dictionary for fun doesn't help either.) But showering adoration on Sharon, Patty's parents in turn treat her with the sort of generic cruelty reserved for other people's (annoying) children—her father with tempestuous irritation: "Are you questioning me? Are you contradicting me?"—and her mother with an endless stream of politely pointed barbs meant to establish just how hideously unworthy to be her daughter Patty truly is:

"When I was a girl," said my mother, turning towards Mrs. Fields, "I used to drive my mother crazy with my clothes. If my dress wasn't new or if it had the slightest little wrinkle in it I'd cry and throw myself across the bed."

"You were just particular about how you looked," said Mrs. Fields.

"I wish Patricia would be more particular," Mother said with sudden force. "Would you just look at that hair?...Here. Go look in the mirror and do a good job. You know, Gussie, you'd expect two sisters to be something alike, but Patricia doesn't care how she looks while Sharon is just like me."

Didn't mother know I was still standing here?...I took in my reflection: "Oh, mirror mirror on the wall, who's the homeliest one of all?"

Mrs. Fields smiled her adult-to-child smile. "How are you enjoying your vacation? As much as my niece, Donna Ann?"

I wondered how I could honestly answer the question. First I'd have to decided how much I was enjoying the summer — not all that much — then find out exactly how much Donna Ann Rhodes was enjoying it before trying to make an accurate comparison. Mrs. Fields' smile began to fade. Maybe she just wanted me to say something pleasant. "Yes, ma'am," I answered.

"Hey, Ruth!" She looked up from her wash. "Ruth, know where I was? With the Germans going to the prison camp!"

She gave me her have-you-been-up-to-some-devilment look.

"I didn't do a single thing wrong!" I said...."This is still my week to be good and sweet. I haven't forgotten."

Her face opened wide enough to catch the sunshine. "I'm mighty pleased to hear it. 'Cause before this week is through, your mamma and daddy gonna recognize your natural sweetness and give you some back, and then you gonna return even more and—"

"Maybe so," I interrupted her, and she went back to putting bed sheets through the wringer, understanding that I didn't want to talk about them anymore.

At his temple a vein was pulsating like a neon sign...He pointed a single quivering finger at me. "If you don't come here this instant I'll give you a beating you're never going to forget."

....Fingers crossed, I stepped through the opening in the hedge to stand soldier-straight before my father.

"Closer!"

One one foot advanced before a hand tore against my face, sending me into total blackness.

We never know exactly, but we do understand that it is partly her parents refusal to love Patty — to even recognize her—that puts her in the way of Anton Reiker, the POW who, like Ruth and her grandmother, finds much in Patty to respect and like. When Jenkinsville becomes the site for a POW camp housing German prisoners (this kind of thing apparently totally happened!) Patty, who is so open to the outside world she actually instinctively waves at the prisoners, is disappointed by the banal nature of the crew: "In the movies war criminals being hustled off to prison would be dramatic. But in real life it didn't seem all that important. Not really a big deal. My stomach growled, reminding me it must be nearing lunchtime."

When she meets Anton at her father's store (the prisoners, put to work picking cotton, are brought in to by straw hats), she is further confused by how different he is from what she has been led to expect:

...he was looking at me like he saw me—like he liked what he saw.

"I'll take the one you choose," said Reiker. He placed six yellow pencils and three stenographic pads on the counter. "And you did not tell me," he said, "what you call these pocket pencil sharpeners."

"He was so nice. How could he have been one of those—those brutal, black-booted Nazis? "Well, I don't think they actually call them much of anything, but if they were to call them by their right name they'd probably call them pocket pencil sharpeners."

Reiker laughed and for a moment, this moment, we were friends. And now I knew something more. He wasn't a bad man.

His mouth came open. "Jewish?" An index finger pointed towards me. "You're Jewish?"

I thought he knew. I guess I thought everybody knew....As I nodded Yes, my breathing came to a halt while my eyes clamped shut.

Suddenly, strong baritone laughter flooded the room...'It's truly extraordinary," he said. "Who would believe it? 'Jewish girl risks all for German soldier.' Tell me, Patty Bergen—" his voice became soft, but with a trace of hoarseness—"why are you doing this for me?"

It wasn't complicated. Why didn't he know? There was really only one word for it. A simple little word that in itself is reason enough.

"The reason I'm doing this for you," I started off, "is only that I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you."

But in the end, this does not matter, Bette Green's work is stunning not only for it's tragic proportions, but for the revelation of the great complexities of love and cruelty, and how we find them in the strangest places. I cried about 900 times while rereading this book, but I cried the most in two instances—when Anton, seeing Patty's father beating her, comes running out of his hiding place to protect her, and then when Ruth, who sees Anton run out, accepts that, as horrible as it is, Patty's refusal to hate will always put her in harm's way:

"I want you to tell Ruth the truth about something. You hear me talking, girl?" I nodded Yes.

"You tell me who is that man."

..."The man is my friend," I said at last.

Ruth signed like she sometimes does before tackling a really big job. "He's not the one the law's after? Not the one from the prison camp?"

"Yes."

Her forehead crinkled up like a washboard. "You telling me, Yes, he's not the one?"

"No, Ruth, I'm telling you yes. Yes, he's the one."

Ruth's head moved back and forth in a No direction. "Oh, Lord, why you sending us more, Lord? Don't this child and me have burden enough?"

• • • •

Now, for the winner of this week's challenge: Congratulations, one Rhadika B., whose self-proclaimed "lame guess" was in fact the only correct one: Sooner or Later by Bruce and Carole Hart, the most passed-around flashlight bunk-book of my era.

Seriously, how weirdly pervy is this cover?


I want to add double well-played to Rhadika, since actually I totally forgot to add that the boyfriend was a musician, and actually the hair of the CHARACTER is red, but the hair on the cover really isn't all that red. Take this as a lesson: Never run yourself down! That is for other people who don't know what they're talking about. Rhadika, you've earned the right to demand a column of your choosing. Email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your booty.

Shoutout also to Beth D., who answered a question I didn't even know was a question: For all of those who didn't know what I was talking about last week, the book about the kids solving a mystery involving St. John the Divine and a genie is Madeleine L'Engle's The Young Unicorns, a wonderful, wonderful work that marks the point where L'Engle begins to port Vicky Austin into wacko supernatural territory. Still, my favorite has always been Dragons in the Waters, which stars Polly O'Keefe (I am a Polly!), Meg's daughter, on a freighter, where they also get into all this mishegos involving the Quiztano Indians, who I think are also in a Swiftly Tilting Planet, along with all that Madoc Maddox stuff? Are they? Oy, maybe we should just do L'Engle for like six months and work this all out.

Now to this week's plotfinder, which is actually from reader Kelli S., who emailed me the following:

Here is what I remember....There, for some reason I don't remember why, aren't any adults left. The main character is this girl and her brothers and sisters who have to learn to live on there own. They learn to drive a car and they're always driving around looking for food. At one point thers is some bird in a cage. The bird is a big deal, I can't remember why. They are always worried about this gang of bad kids so they carry around baseball bats to defend themselves. The end up fighting the gang and being able to live in peace. There are some sexual overtones at points. It's very gritty. It's not like the Boxcar Children or anything. I remember the cover of the paperback version we had had this dark blue cover with a picture of a girl getting out of a car in the rain...It was all about survival.

If you know the answer, either stick in it the comments or email me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Send intemperate demands to same. First correct gets it, and I will announce the winner next week!

Fine Lines
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]
Summer Of My German Soldier [Amazon]

Earlier: 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 'From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler', E.L. Konigsburg's 1967 novel about extremely unaccompanied minors run amok at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I miss New York. Not the New York somewhere over to my left. A New York before The Squid & The Whale brought divorce to the Museum of Natural History. A New York before nannies got groped; a New York before private-school girls intertwangled lustily on beds in some benighted plan to rule the school. It was a New York that had room for a notepad-toting minor to spy unaccompanied on people through dumbwaiters; a boy to wander Chinatown having adventures with a cricket; teenagers to contend with a genie in a mystery at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Not a world where children playact adult dramas, or unhappily contend with the chaos adults leave in their wake. It's a New York that keeps adults perpetually at shoulder-level, briefcases and purses jostling, while the children, front-and-center in the frame, get up to whatever children get up to.

The children in question are one Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, Greenwich-residing, grammar-school-aged siblings. (Re: In an earlier Fine Lines comment thread, an admitted pedant pointed out that FTMUFOMBEF is technically middle-grade, not YA. Since as far as I can tell, these categories exist primarily for schoolteachers, booksellers, and award-givers, Fine Lines will from now on define "YA" as any book read in one's own company from the time one learns to read to the time one pays one's own rent.) The children's getting-up-to entails one very long, unauthorized stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they come upon a statue of an angel which may or may not be carved by Michelangelo — and this, as they say, changes everything.

Claudia Kincaid, architect of the above scheme, is a child of her own mind in all the best ways, quite unlike the mini-me adults passing for precocious nowadays. (Have readers cottoned on yet to how much I hate the conceit of the preternaturally-wise, sophisticated child who wryly keeps adults in line? Gilmore Girls notwithstanding, I *hate* that child.) Forgoing hot-fudge sundaes for weeks to finance the venture, Claudia's choice of hideout is the very reflection of her particular personality:

She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

....But not entirely. Claudia knew that it had a lot to do with injustice. She was the oldest child and the only girl and was subject to a lot of injustice. Perhaps it was because she had to both empty the dishwasher and set the table on the same night while her brothers [Preach it! —Lizzie.] got out of everything. And, perhaps, there was another reason more clear to me than to Claudia. A reason that had to do with the sameness of each and every week. She was bored with simply being straight-A's Claudia Kincaid. She was tired of arguing about whose turn it was to choose the Sunday night seven-thirty television show, of injustice, and of the monotony of everything.

But more about that later! First, the Met.

It will be generally admitted that the scenes depicting Claudia and Jamie's initial stay at the Met are the most sublime realizations to have ever penetrated the shelves of man. After filling their violin and trumpet cases with clothes, hiding out on the back of their schoolbus, then sneaking off to ("How can you sneak off to?") catch the 10:42 to Grand Central, they spend the day at the museum choosing the antique bed upon which to sleep, then hide out into the bathrooms until all all the staff has left:

...she lay there in the great quiet of the museum next to the warm quiet of her brother and allowed the soft stillness to settle around them: a comforter of quiet. The silence seeped from their heads to their soles and into their souls. They stretched out and relaxed. Instead of oxygen and stress, Claudia thought now of hushed and quiet words: glide, fur, banana, peace. Even the footsteps of the night watchman added only an accented quarter-note to the silence that had become a hum, a lullaby.

Because, as Claudia begins to realize, she has come to the museum not only because she is sick of being the old Claudia, but because she wants — needs! — to return to Greenwich a different Claudia, a Claudia who has bigger concerns than keeping her whites and colors separated, brushing her teeth, and correcting her brother's grammar: "An answer to running away, and to going home again, lay in Angel," she thinks.

...."The statue just gave me a chance...almost gave me a chance. We need to make more of a discovery."

"So do the people of the museum. What more of a discovery do you think that you, Claudia Kincaid, girl runaway, can make? A tape recording of Michelangelo saying, 'I did it?" Well, I'll clue you in. They didn't have tape recorders 470 years ago."

"I know that. But if we make a real discovery, I'll know how to go back to Greenwich."

"You take the New Haven, silly. Same way we go here." Jamie was losing patience.

"That's not what I mean. I want to know how to go back to Greenwich different."

Jamie shook his head. "If you want to go different, you can take the subway to 125th Street and then take the train."

"I didn't say differently, I said different. I want to go back different."

..."Claudia, I'll tell you one thing you can do different..."

"Differently," Claudia interrupted.

"Oh, boloney, Claude. That's exactly it. You can stop ending every single discussion with an argument about grammar."

"I'll try," Claudia said quietly.

....Claudia's excitement flowed not bubbled. I could see that she was a little surprised. She had known that Angel would have the answer, but she had expected it to be a loud bang, not a quiet soaking in. Of course secrets make a difference. That's why planning the runaway had been such fun; it was a secret. And hiding in the museum had been a secret. But they weren't permanent; they had to come to an end. Angel wouldn't. She could carry the secret of Angel inside her for twenty years just as I had. Now she wouldn't have to be a heroine when she returned home...expect to herself. And now she knew something about secrets that she hadn't known before.

• • • • •

Hi all! We had almost no takers and no winner for last week's challenge, which involved a green marble egg chochke and an appalling dearth of accompanying information. I'm becoming convinced it might have been an English edition of It's Not The End of the World, or something, because you know how wild the English are about those marble green eggs. Too bad, but the challenge is still open to a winner at any point, so if the answer occurs to you later, egg me away.

Moving right along, this week's challenge:

What's the book with a redhead on the cover that is about a relationship and occurs ENTIRELY in one-line paragraphs, basically? I think it's followed by a flip book where the boy also gets to discuss the relationship.

As always, answer in the comments below or email jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Be first or be worst!

A special treat for this week's winner: you will also receive a copy of the 75th anniversary edition of Little House in the Big Woods! (Only Continental US for that one, sorry. The Fine Lines pocket is linty and filled with holes, for the most part.) You can also email wishes, comments, suggestions, complaints, and epistolary novels to the email above. Rest assured, I file each and every email in a row of big cabinets and label them for maximum difficulty.

From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]
Fine Lines

Earlier: 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 'A Gift Of Magic, Lois Duncan's 1971 story of 11-year-old Nancy Barrett, whose grandmother bequeaths her a totally ESPecial legacy.

If every author has their red-headed stepchild of a book (John Updike: The Witches of Eastwick: WTF?), every author also has the book that, whether it's a reader favorite or not, seems the purest expression of their very authorial being.

For me, A Gift of Magic has always been that most scalp-prickling of a work—even more striking because the book eschews the convention Duncan is best known for among teen readers: namely, being fucking terrifying. (Do I still think of Lia's half-smile in Stranger With My Face while she's looking at herself in the mirror, brushing her purely evil hair with her twin sister LAURA'S BRUSH right after she's stolen her body, preparing to step out into the evening and go steal her BOYFRIEND, with measurable trembling? Do you even have to ask?) But there's no evil twin, no menacing stranger in A Gift of Magic — only a girl fighting with a power she does not yet understand or control.

When the book begins, our precogriffic heroine Nancy Barrett, older sister, Kirby, and younger brother Brendon have just been taken by their mother, Elizabeth, back to her childhood home in Florida. This follows Elizabeth's amicable separation from their father, a war photographer who dragged his entire family all over the world on an endless international heat-seeking jaunt that left them global travelers but curiously sheltered. So sheltered, actually, that the entire family takes Nancy's gift for knowing who's on the phone or that someone is coming to the door completely for granted, and the reader is introduced to Nancy's psychic powers on the first page in a suitable blink-and-you'd-miss-it way:

Nancy pulled herself awake and sat up in bed. "Mother's crying," she said.

It was a stupid question. Of course, there was something wrong. There had been something wrong for days, for weeks, for months even. Now that the words had actually been spoken, Nancy could feel, with a sick kind of acceptance, the great wave of wrongness rising higher and higher above them, ready to come toppling over to swamp them all. With a violent effort she braced herself against it and made her mind go closed.

She closed her eyes tightly and reached out—out—across the miles, the hundreds and thousands of miles—to the place where their father was....it was a business lunch and he was getting briefed on the next assignment. There was a notebook by his plate and a pencil, but the page of the book was empty, for he had not been taking notes. His mind was away from the conversation...

Still, the change is most severe on Nancy, who not only must deal with poking around in all of her family's heads and feeling what's going on with them, but also that her ESP — which she does not even know is called ESP, EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS ESP — does not fly as easily in the world of the public high school. As this is a pre-Blubber era narrative, when teacher abuse still trumped peer abuse, Nancy's harsh debut into the world of the unbelieving takes place when she mistakenly starts putting the answers to a geography quiz down before the teacher has even asked the questions:

"No, Nancy, you did not imagine these questions," Miss Green said. "They are exactly the questions that I asked the previous classes. I would be very interested in learning how you knew what they would be."

There was a long silence. All around them, heads were raised and turned in their direction. Thirty pens were held, suspended, over thirty sheets of paper as thirty students waited to hear Nancy's explanation.

"I—I don't know," Nancy said slowly. "I just sort of—knew. I do that sometimes."

"Wait," he said. "Now, let's wait a minute, Miss Green. I would like to hear a bit more about this ability of Nancy's. There is such a thing as extrasensory perception, you know, although we don't run into it to often."

"Extrasensory perception?" Miss Green's mouth fell open. She stared at the counselor as though she thought he had gone crazy. "Oh, come now, Mr. Duncan, surely you can't be serious!"

"Indeed I am," Mr. Duncan said firmly. "ESP does exist. I am quite positive of it. I have known these girls' family for years, and I have often wondered if their grandmother didn't possess the gift..."

And with this revelation, Nancy has a name for what has always been—and starts to realize that she, like Kirby, may also have something that distinguishes her as an individual:

"Well, what is it exactly?" Kirby asked. "Is there more than one kind?"

"There sure is." Nancy referred to the book. "There's one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what the other person is thinking. Then there's clairvoyance; that means knowing when something's happened. There are two other kinds two—precognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past."

"....It's your gift, isn't it? This ESP thing? Like my gift is dancing? ...."

Because A Gift of Magic isn't so much about a girl with ESP as it is about a family that, plopped like spores in a new environment, have to learn how to grow without destroying themselves. Kirby, given the freedom to study dance all her passionate heart desires, has to learn to not become completely anorexic and starve herself to look like a dancer, then fall down and break her leg and almost lose the gift because of nerve damage, but then triumphantly be okay. Elizabeth has to learn that it's all right to let go of the past, and marry Tom Duncan and be her own person, even if her daughter Nancy isn't thrilled about it. Brendon, whose gift is music, has to learn that even if he's going to squander that gift, it's still not a good idea to make a boat out of a door and old crates and set sail into the Gulf, and that if he does, he better shout loudly at his psychic sister's mind so she and Tom Duncan can save him before he drowns on the spit. And it's Nancy, most of all, who has to learn that her powers aren't evil, and they're not all-encompassing — they're just another part of her, a gift given out of love. Also that she should butt out of her mother's business.

Do they still write books about ESP and various other girls charged with special powers all the time? Because I've always wondered if those bloomed in particular during the 70s and 80s because it was a time before a fractured family became a given, and that, if it's the case, for the daughters growing up in a new hierarchy, they struck a particularly hopeful note. Because Nancy's family has undergone a turbulent dissolution, true, but it doesn't crush her — in fact, it gives her the ability to learn more about herself and what she can achieve than she would have had her mother stuck out an unhappy marriage. Duncan is having fun with faux-spookily showing off Nancy's special powers, true. But at the end of the day, A Gift of Magic is redemptive because it is simply about power.


•Ladies: I am so sorry — one week spacing and one week off and I completely forgot to announce the winner for the previous challenge, viz: Name the book in which one best friend moves to NY and they buy matching dresses in purple and orange on a visit and the new New Yorker chides her country bumpkin pal for saying "Avenue of the Americas" instead of Sixth Avenue.

The answer is, of course, "The Trouble With Thirteen," by Betty Miles, and the winner is Sarah R., the subject line of whose email read, "I think about it every time I cross 6th." ME TOO. Sarah, write me a jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize — you can suggest any book to Fine Lines and I will do it within the next month (ish).

This week's challenge is actually kind of impossible, and if anyone gets it, they deserve some sort of actual, tangible award — like a "Fine Lines" commemorative bookmark or something. As it is, I only have the gift of the column itself. So. What is the book that has a cover of a girl with her head on the table, looking sideways at — I kid you not — a marble green egg of the chochke variety? The girl, I believe, has bangs and long brown hair, and it's an actual photograph, not an illustration. The book is about a very messy divorce in NY where the stepmother comes to live with the family.

You can enter in the the comments or write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com, where you can also write with book suggestions and any other semi-related demands. Also, does anyone have the right cover for this thing? I actually grew up with the one with the girl's face in front of pink clouds looking all intense and psychic, and I will not feel whole without it. Thanks in advance to sympathetic scanners.

Earlier: 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 Secret Garden', Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1909 novel about an orphan who gardens her way to a good character.

Somewhere along the line, along with straw prams and caning rods, having a child character not even the narrator can stand went out of business. (Off the top of my head, I can only think of Ingalls Wilder's condemnation of Nellie, and you know she was just writing the God's honest truth.) But in the case of Mary Lennox, daughter of Colonial India, Frances Hodgson Burnett does not stint:

She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow, because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.

This is all on the first page, mind. Because Mary, whose father serves in the colonial government and is cared for only by servants because her careless, beautiful mother and her sickly, absent father cannot be bothered with her, is not only ugly but possessed of a terrible character. Here's where we are by the second page:

...by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.

And...done! That's page 4. Moving right along, we soon find Mary in the hands of Mrs. Medlock, who is not a bad woman but is more interested in the cold chicken and beef (19th century British food porn, sigh) they serve on the train than in Mary's welfare. Mrs. Medlock is in the employ of a certain Dickensian-ish Mr. Craven, a rich, reclusive old soul and Mary's uncle by marriage and now guardian, after his beautiful young wife's early death. Miss Medlock is empowered to transport Mary back to England to Misselthwaite Manor, where Mr. Craven lives in splendid, therapy-free isolation.

Okaythatisallyourbackstory. Misselthwaite is the kind of gloomy old 100-room barn now made stock through a battery of media (see: My Cousin Rachel, The Others, Gosford Park, the works of Merchant Ivory, who might all actually *use* the same house), and this abrupt rustication is the first step in Mary becoming not the COMPLETELY worst child in the world. As Burnett (who, in her age, was something like J.K. Rowling mashed with Oprah with a little Elizabeth Taylor thrown in) spends about 300 pages establishing this, you can't fault her for dogging on the girl in the beginning.

Mary's first reeducation begins with waking to meet her young, red-faced, way talkative Yorkshire servant, Martha:

The native servants she had been used to in India were not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they were equals. They made salaams and called them "protector of the poor" and names of that sort. Indian servants were commanded to do things, not asked. It was not the custom to say "please" and "thank you" and Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry. She wondered a little what this girl would do if one slapped her in the face. She was a round, rosy, good-natured-looking creature, but she had a sturdy way which made Mistress Mary wonder if she might not even slap back—if the person who slapped her was only a little girl.

But through Martha — on literally the first day, I think; if Burnett is anything, she is speedy — Mary learns that she is, um, SUPPOSED to do that, and also about how it's rude to not eat your oatmeal when all of Martha's 8 brothers and sisters in a shack on the moor would eat it in about two seconds, and, about Martha's brother Dickon, who can talk to all the animals of the moor, like missel thrushes, whatever those are.

But most important, Mary, who if not a "that's classified" sort of person, tells Mary about one of the house's gardens:

"Mr. Craven had it shut when his wife died so sudden. He won't let no one go inside. It was her garden. He locked th' door an' dug a hole and buried th' key. There's Mrs. Medlock's bell ringing — I must run."

Because Mary has been put in a house of secrets. The garden is paramount, but on top of that there is the mystery of Dickon, and how a boy can talk to animals; there is the question of why Mr. Craven is so miserable and hunchbacked; there is the problem of what the hell everyone is saying, because Mary cannot understand the Yorkshire accent at all; and, most important, there is the issue of the wailing Mary often hears through the halls, a fretful sound she knows is more than the wind.

I will not go into the mysteries of the house, because I don't want to ruin the book for the two of you who may not have read it, or repeat it for those who have surely read it 6,000 times, as everyone who reads it once does immediately thereafter. But The Secret Garden, more than anything, is about those who are locked up, and those who grow — both literally and emotionally.

This is true of persons and of nations. Mary is not the only one who, before she becomes a careful gardener, idly skims her wealth off the labor of the poor and is made sick by it. Hodgson is also writing about the wasteful, destructive nature of England — its despicable conquest of another country, its rampant profiteering, the corruption from within being caused by the corruption without. England's idle rich are wealthy, but in The Secret Garden, their wealth only serves to oppress — even to deform! — those who possess it. Misselthwaite's owner, its heir, and Mary are England the colonizer — and its as piggish, tyrannical and sickly a country as Mary ever was.

But this is not true of the simple people of the moor, armed with their strategic knowledge of larkspur and hot-cross-buns! Schooled by the simple people of the moor, by their own servants, Mary and the other inhabitants of locked-up Misselthwaite are revived. Of course, the servants and Dickon are a little too joyously occupied with the happiness of their employers to make this a handy pamphlet for Mao, but in the case of wealthy versus healthy, colonizer versus fertilizer, they win absolutely. In Burnett's view, England itself is a locked-up garden which, only tended by the wealthy and humble alike, can express the true beauty of the nation.

In fact, Burnett is saying, there is an instinctive shovel in all of us that would improve our spirits if we were only left to dig, and if we then ate enough hot cross buns and milk to feed our newly fired appetites, our characters would improve as well. Today, we mainly have the loops of IKEA and the concourses of Newark airport to run around in, building our appetites through synthetic buttercream, and the only secret is what is that horrible-smelling blue cake they put in the public toilets. Still, Burnett, I raise my Cinnabon to you, and toast you with my Frappuccino. We will get there eventually.

The Secret Garden [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan

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, New York Observer reporter, blogger and Postcards From Yo Momma co-creator Doree Shafrir rereads 'The Chocolate War,' Robert Cormier's 1974 novel about a 14-year-old boy who stands up to the bullies at his high school.

Cheery stuff! But that was the world that Cormier portrayed, a world divided into those who challenged authority (which was usually wrong, bordering on evil) and those who quietly submitted.

Indeed, the protagonist of The Chocolate War is a freshman named Jerry Renault who defies tradition at his high school by refusing to sell boxes of chocolates as part of the annual fundraiser. Jerry's mom is dead (cancer) and his dad works late at the pharmacy, and they live in a small third-floor apartment in a nameless town.

Rereading Cormier's book, I was struck by not only just how very '70s this all felt — the latchkey kid heating up some Campbell's Soup in front of the TV and putting himself to bed — but also how Cormier portrays a world that's decidedly working or middle class, and that's a world that's pretty gray and grim. There's little happiness here; the book opens with Jerry getting pummeled at football practice, and — in contrast to the almost-expected happy endings of today — ends on a really discordant, violent note. (The book has long been on the American Library Association's list of most-banned young adult books for its violence and sexual graphicness, though this mostly involves descriptions of masturbation, you know, like a kid getting caught yanking it in the boys' bathroom with his pants around his ankles.)

Even Archie Connor, the leader of a shady gang called The Vigils, who act as a sort of secret fraternity at the school and keep underclassmen in line through sadistic "assignments," seems like a loser; he has the school in the palm of his hand, but he's failing English. It's also a world that's almost exclusively male. The only women who show up are Jerry's mom, who's dead, and a couple objects of desire, one of whom makes a cameo when Jerry looks her name up in the phone book and cold-calls her. It doesn't go well, which is kind of the theme of this whole book: Life sucks, and then you die. Another student reflects on his parents:

He thought of his own parents and their useless lives — his father collapsing into his nap every night after supper and his mother looking tired and dragged-out all the time. What the hell were they living for? ... How could he tell [his mom] that he hated the house, that his mother and father were dead and didn't know it, that if it wasn't for television the place would be like a tomb.

At the beginning of the book, Jerry gets caught staring as he waits for the bus at a group of hippies who hang out at a park in town. One of them confronts him and says, "Go get on your bus, square boy. Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus." So Jerry gets on the bus and thinks "of his life — going to school and coming home. Even though his tie was loose, dangling on his shirt, he yanked it off." Oho! The anti-establishment rebel! So, I thought, let's settle in and enjoy a ride through anti-authoritarianism... Except it doesn't exactly work out like that.

Throughout the book, Cormier carefully sets Jerry up as a rebel, the lone voice willing to challenge the oppression of Brother Leon, the acting headmaster, who has allegedly embezzled money and thus must make up for it by selling thousands of boxes of chocolates; and Archie, who makes a deal with Brother Leon that the Vigils will ensure that the chocolate sale goes smoothly. So when Jerry refuses to sell the chocolates, he's taking on not only the school, but also the school bullies. Like the scene with the hippies, Cormier continues on the heavy-handed symbolism route thereafter — Jerry has a poster in his locker of a lone man on a beach with a quote from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at the bottom, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Get it? He's an iconoclast! He might even singlehandedly bring about change. How very '60s of him!

Alas. If the '60s were the decade of challenging authority and protesting and civil disobedience, the '70s were the decade when everyone came blinking into the sunlight and realized that there were limits to what they could change about the world. And so Cormier takes us all the way there, and then ends The Chocolate War with a violent boxing match between Jerry and a thuggish senior named Emile, and Archie and Brother Leon both return to their rightful (perhaps) place in the world order. One of Jerry's last thoughts of the book is about his friend Goober (no one names their characters Goober anymore!), the one boy in school who stood by him — until he gets "sick" for three days just when Jerry really could've used some help:

"It'll be all right, Jerry."

No it won't. He recognized Goober's voice and it was important to share the discovery with Goober. He had to tell Goober to play ball, to play football, to run, to make the team, to sell the chocolates, the sell whatever they wanted you to sell, to do whatever they wanted you to do. He tried to voice the words but there was something wrong with his mouth, his teeth, his face. But he went ahead anyway, telling Goober what he needed to know. They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

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 'To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie', the 1982 story of Sylvie Krail, who hits the road for Hollywood with a hatbox and a dream.

To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie — set in the 50s, peppered with references to Sen-Sens, James Dean, and oddments spelled "Teena"—is particularly vulnerable to such unjust switcheroos, as its subject matter hits notes from favorite by several heavy hitters: After veering vaguely into Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself territory, we pivot momentarily off Bette Greene's Summer of My German Soldier, then careen for a moment into Francine Pascal's Hangin' Out With Cici.

But though the book bears glancing similarities with those others—a young girl obsessed with Hollywood, crappy father figures, Eisenhower-era signifiers — its entirely its own animal: a comic quest in which a 15-year-old tries desperately to get to Hollywood before a series of foster fathers and assorted other creeps get their hands on her.

When I originally read the story of 15-year-old Sylvie Krail, however, I'm not sure the complete direness of the situation — IF YOU WILL FORGIVE ME — penetrated entirely. Taking place over the course of 5 days in which Sylvie escapes her last foster home in New York and almost makes it to California (had it been written from the point of view of the eponymous heroine, I would have to add Lolita to the probable mixup file now), the book could basically stand beside Transamerica in the Humorous Heartwarmers For Adults That Begin With Really Unpleasant Sexual Encounters, Actually department.

When we meet Sylvie, who is exactly good-looking enough to invite perpetual trouble, she's that strange, singularly adolescent mixture of precociously cynical and totally out to lunch, deftly avoiding being routinely pawed by her yucky "Uncle" Ted while simultaneously spending $14.99 (=$3,455 current deficit dollars) of her hard-earned $137 runaway dollars on a hatbox, have-to model's gear, in preparation for her flight:

I figured I had about an hour and a half before they came back from church. I wished I could take a nice, cool shower, but there wasn't time. Everything had to be packed and my hatbox and suitcase had to be hidden before they got back from church.

Church. That was a laugh. Uncle Ted going to church and singing the hymns and praying to God and looking all Christian and holy five minutes after trying to tuck me into bed. What if they knew what he was really like? What if Aunt Grace knew? I bet she'd drop dead right in the middle of her paint-by-numbers oil picture of the last supper.

But maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she'd look straight at me and say, "Sylvie, you must be imagining things." That's what had happened the first time, when I was twelve.

I reached into my pocketbook to get a dim. I felt around, but there was so much stuff in there, I couldn't get to my wallet. I started taking things out and lining them up on the table: my compact, my lipstick, tissues, my pink scarf, the sunglasses with the white plastic frames I'd gotten at Woolworth's, my pad and pencil for letters to my mother and Judy....Faster and faster I grabbed for things, and the more stuff I took out, the more frantic I got. I should have been able to get to the wallet by now...

Luckily, at Sal's Roadside Rest, Sylvie too finds her Good Samaritan, a certain Walter Murchinson, who offers to drive her the rest of the way in his "Pontiac Chief Star Catalina." He is, luckily...:

A Bible salesman! At first I felt this kind of twinge of disappointment that he wasn't a reporter, and wouldn't be doing a story about me...[but] what could be safer than riding with a person who was in the Bible business? Maybe I shouldn't have gotten into the car with a strange man, but if I had to get into a car with any strange man, I was certainly lucky that I had picked Walter Murchison.

(At this moment I am going to refrain from recounting the scene where Sylvie realizes, after they've embarked in said Pontiac and blown past Fort Wayne, that's she's left her suitcase — WITH EVERYTHING SHE OWNS IN IT — on the Greyhound, lest I need to break into my Klonopin. I'm just going to say it occurs on page 79 of the hardcover edition, if you need to gear up too.)

Although Walter has the irritating habit of constantly getting single hotel rooms, he is one hell of a salesman, something Sylvie has much occasion to witness as they stop off in rural for Walter to unload his uplifting stock:

"All God's work is handsome," Walter said. "But if you don't mind a little humor, Mrs. Fitch, the Good News Bible is the deluxe edition of God's work. Now, tell me the truth. Isn't this a Bible you'd be proud to have in your home? Isn't this a Bible that wouldn't be stuck on a shelf somewhere, but would deserve a place of honor right out on a table in your front room? Please look at the gold-tipped pages too, Mrs. Fitch. This isn't just the holy word of God..."

I forgot how hot it was. I forgot my suitcase, my three scratchy crinolines, and changing my name to something other than Venida. I kept looking from Walter to Mrs. Fitch and back to Walter again. This was like a Ping-Pong game and I couldn't figure out who was going to win.

And I wonder if a more complex interaction the adult world — an acknowledgment, basically, that teenagers aren't only in the classroom or camp bunk, and that adults aren't only kitchen-table sages or Amex-wielding enemies — are part of what makes novels from this period so remarkable. Walter doesn't exist in the novel just as a sideline to Sylvie or an aid to her development. In fact, that's the problem—as he tries to get her into bed and to the altar, he's so bent on muscling Sylvie out of the starring role and into a role alongside him, the heroine herself is in danger of being sidelined into his story:

Was it just that...Walter was old enough to be my father and had a big Adam's apple and a bow tie and wore his belt so high that his pants were practically hitched halfway up his chest?...I started getting confused again. Maybe the only thing that would unconfuse me was to start concentrating on my movie career, which I hadn't thought about for what seemed a very long time.

(And I'm going to admit right now that Vic is a very convenient character and generally lifeguards are not psychiatrists-in-training who pick up young girls and solve all their problems in a few hours while also taking them on tours of Vegas and loaning them their sister's peasant blouses and those guys are generally creepy too, okay?)

However, I don't care. Because when Sylvie finally confesses that she wasn't most afraid of Uncle Ted, but of "myself. I was afraid — I'd let him. I wanted him to," Vic stunningly replies: "I don't think that's so unusual."

*blowing my eight-year-old mind*

And then continues to drop the knowledge:

"...So you have these feelings, but what can you do about them? Now, here's Uncle Ted acting affection toward you, and no one else in your whole life ever has. See what I'm getting at?"'

"Not exactly. If I went out with boys I wouldn't feel this way about Uncle Ted?"

Even in the dim, flickering light from the TV screen, I could see Vic was frowning. "I'm not sure. Maybe. I told you this was complicated. I'm just trying to figure it out from what's in my psych books. But why I said it was natural was because you always wanted somebody to love you, and Uncle Ted's acting like he loves you—or, at least, wants to make love to you. And one part of you says that's wrong, but another part of you wants it."

"But that's not love!" I cried. "That's sex."

"Sometimes people don't know the difference."

This week's challenge is similarly bare-bones: In brief, what's the novel where best friends are split when one girl moves to NYC, and when the other visits her they buy matching dresses in blue and orange, but not before she's been told that it's Sixth Ave, not "Avenue of the Americas"?

Answer in the comments or write to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. I have faith in you!

To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan

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 Westing Game', Ellen Raskin's 1978 multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-p.o.v. mystery about the race for a multi-millionaire's fortune.

Okay, it's fine how I just figured out the significance of that line now. But before I get into how I'm still happily flummoxed by a book for the lanyard set, I'd like to say how I've become a little perturbed how technology keeps obviating classic teenage reads. Forget how we no longer need to disembowel our own pigs or avoid being shuttled to the stocks — I mean more recent betrayals, like how the cell phone would have killed Are You in the House Alone, or how Zach could have just kicked Vicky an email after Yellowstone. (I'd still like to think Harriet would have resisted the glories of Facebook.) But worst-worst! — is the most fabulist fabulous The Westing Game, which in present time would have ended abruptly the minute one plugged "FRUITED PURPLE WAVES FOR SEE" into Google.

The story of — do I even need to tell you what this is the story of? Fine, I'll tell you what's it's the story of — a ragtag group who is lured into renting apartments in a luxury apartment building, unbeknownst to its members, to solve a murder — that of the multimillionaire Sam Westing of Westing Paper Products, the shadow of whose mansion looms large over their new homes — and over each of their pasts.

Wow, those flap-copy skills have gotten a little rusty. Anyway, the new tenants of the building are as follows (at great — patience, please — length): The Wexler Family, made up of mother and social climber Grace, father Jake, a bookie, daughter Angela, a beautiful fiancee of Denton Deere, med student, and her sister Turtle, a clever shin-kicker; the Hoo family, comprised of Shin Hoo, proprietor of the building's unsuccessful Chinese restaurant, his son Doug, a long-distance runner, and his non-English-speaking second wife, Mrs. Hoo; Theo Theodorakis and Christos Theodorakis, aspiring writer, crippled birdwatcher, respectively, sons of the proprietor of the building's only successful restaurant, a Greek diner; Flora Baumbach, a unnervingly grinning dressmaker; Berthe Crow, a religous cleaning lady; Judge J.J. Ford, non-Magical Negro and adjudicator; Otis Amber, idiot delivery boy; Barney Northrup, seething building manager, and God I am probably forgetting someone. Secretary Sydelle Pulaski! Well, she was the mystery's "mistake" anyway. And oh, right, Sandy McSouthers, the genial doorman. Anyone with Aspberger's has solved this whole thing by now, but let's continue.

The book commences as follows: the players learn of their mysterious fate — though not of each other's connections to Westing — after the mysterious death of the man in question. Called to the mansion, they are declared heirs, then split into teams and given a series of nonsensical clues written on paper towels, like SEA MOUNTAIN AM O (these are for Flora and Turtle, whose team actually would have had no luck with Google at all!). Their object, with this scarce matter, is to find Westing's murderer-the prize, his 200 million dollar fortune.

What follows is less an And Tween There Were None than a Shakespearian farce, mainly because — aside from the fact that Turtle is the only tween — as the mystery unfolds, Raskin is less concerned with the exigencies of the plot as with the particulars of her characters. It's not mistake that the first task of the heirs is to write down their professions (e.g., "Angela Wexler: none"; Alexander McSouthers: "Doorman.") This is because it's not only the murder of Sam that's a mystery — it's that the players are, deliberately or subconsciously — hiding their true identities as well.

And in this regard, it's fascinating that Raskin doesn't assume the reader is so unsophisticated as to be able to grasp that the players are all currently gripped by identity crises. Grace is terrified her maiden name, "Windkloppel," will be found out. Turtle knows her mother likes her less than Angela, who is emotionally paralyzed by how no one ever refers to anything but her looks or her impending marriage. Judge J.J. can't get over the fact that her education was funded by a man she hates, and Flora is haunted by the death of her disabled daughter. Speaking of disabled, Chris is mortified by his constantly flailing limbs, and Sydelle is triumphant over finally being noticed after a lifetime of secretarial invisibility. And on top of that, among the players, there is thief, a bomber, a private detective, a bookie, a guilt-stricken mother, liar..and, of course, THE MURDERER, and I'm sorry I keep lapsing into flap copy, seriously — it's just that I made an editorial decision to not spoil the plot for you, and what I mainly have left are sonorous overtones of intrigue.

But as it happens, although the building is a Benetton ad-worthy array of oddities, our triumphant multi-culti unity as a nation is not Raskin's lesson. Ethnicity-wise, we see the (generally humorous) warts: Mr. Hoo added the "Shin" because he thought it would make him sound more Chinese, Jake notes Grace conveniently forgets he's a Jew, people talk to Chris like he's 5, and Grace compliments Mrs. Hoo for being so "doll-like and inscrutable," then makes her hors d'oeuvres in a Cheongsam. (I can't blame Raskin for Law & Order for running the black-female-judge meme into the ground.)

The Westing Game is more than a mystery — it's a profound meditation on how humans, given the same clues, miss what's actually missing, projecting, instead, our own images onto the negative space. In future financier Turtle's case, she's convinced her clues represent stock picks — as Theo studies chemistry, he becomes convinced they're an equation. Grace Wexler is so intent on proving she's Sam Westing's niece she doesn't even notice she actually is Sam Westing's niece, and in the unfolding of their race to the finish, J.J. can only see the outlines of the chess moves with which Sam repeatedly defeated her as a girl when she lived in his mansion as the daughter of the maid.

But these self-generated projections don't trap the participants — they're the keys to their freedom. At the last reading of the will, the sheaf of paper mysteriously defines them all not as what they've been but as what they've become: Turtle, financier; Flora, dressmaker; Theo, writer; Doug, champ; Mr. Hoo, inventor; Grace, restaurateur; Jake, bookie; Mrs. Hoo, cook; Angela Wexler, person. The real Sam Westing will die many years from now on the Fourth of July, but the will wishes the assembled a happy 4th — to their great confusion — for another reason: For all of the residents of Sunset Towers, the end of the game is Independence Day.

Note: Last week I asked where The Moon By Night broke the space-time continuum. Poor fools! It was when Vicky and Co. commented that they'd like to Tesser to the next park, referencing, of course, A Wrinkle in Time. I think L'Engle even goes all into it and is all like, "The Austins were speaking of course, of A Wrinkle in Time." And why does this break the space-time continuum? Because if Meg is, within the fictional contraints of The Moon By Night, like, LITERALLY a fictional character, then how does her therefore-fictional daughter Polly also date ZACH, who is dating Vicky in REAL LIFE! Do you see what I'm saying? Is your mind BLOWN?

Anyway, this week's challenge is a little more bare-bones. Simply: What's the book where the father gets the bends? (I'm Google-proofing this not because I'm clever, but because seriously that's pretty much all I can remember.) Winner gets double-snaps in next week's column.

Also: For the 674 people who wrote and commented en masse HELLOoooo on this one, I apologize for delaying a fave. But let a girl get her blog legs! (In the future, if you'd like to write me and urge me not-so-gently to get going on any particular book, I've set up an account at jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Use it, abuse it. I promise — for those of you boiling weekly to Krakatoa-like levels of impatience, I've made a little list of about 94,347 books, and your faves are on it — and I always read the comments in case they're not. (Snaps to whoever reminded me of Jane-Emily!)

(Thanks to Catherine at This Girl Remembers for this week's cover pic.)

Earlier: 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
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan

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 Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 novel 'The Moon By Night,' in which Vicky Austin goes camping and gets to know boys from A to Z.

It was John's voice and he was calling for me. I supposed somewhere on the inside of my mind I realized it, but with the outside of my mind all I heard was the constant crying of sea gulls and the incoming boom of breakers.

Don't buy into the party of unity: When it's comes to Madeleine L'Engle, you're either a Meg, Polly, or Vicky girl. (NO ONE is Camilla. And whatever, Maggies — you're deliberately being provoking.) For those of you rusty on the trois dames of L'Engle's works, Meg is, OF COURSE, Meg Murray, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, while Polly (Polyhymnia) is her red-headed daughter of the excellent Dragons in the Waters action. Vicky is Vicky Austin, of Meet the Austins, two kinds of awkward, three kinds of innocent, and strangely appealing for a fourteen-year-old given to frequent bouts of vigorous prayer.

The Moon By Night is the second in the Austin family trilogy, and when we catch up with Vicky, she's just exited the ugly duckling stage, where all her "sticky-out bones and unmanageable hair seem to come to some sort of agreement." (Exiting the awkward stage, as we have learned, is a narratively advantageous time to launch a novel, AS WE CAN NOW GET A LOVE INTEREST OR POSSIBLY TWO IN THE MIX. More on that soon.)

The Austin family — of the kindly physician father, the lovely stay-at-home mother, the older, supersmart brother, John, the pretty youngest daughter, Suzy, the surprise child, Rob, and Vicky in the middle — have just married off Vicky's mother's best friend to her uncle, deposited their foster daughter, Maggie, with the happy couple, and headed off on a camping trip across the country, bearing their usual Austin cheer with them:

"When we reached the mainland we headed for a parkway and started playing the alphabet game. You know, you divide up by who's sitting on which side of the car, and you have to find the letters of the alphabet, in order, one by one, on the signs. John and Daddy and Suzy were way ahead until they came to Q, and then Mother and Rob and I caught up with them and won. Then we played Animal Rummy, and Rob saw a white horse and won that. And of course we sang. We always do a lot of singing."

"John [is] terrifically intelligent, but not a bit of a grind. I mean, he just comes home from school and sits down and gets his homework done in half the time it takes me to do mine. He's good at sports, too, the kind you can do with glasses on, like basketball and track. As far as I can see he's good at just about everything, I'm proud of him, sure, but sometimes I feel, well, just kind of said, because I can't ever hope to be the kind of person John is. I don't even know what I want to be yet."

In fact, the whole Christianity thing is so sublimated you are mostly concentrated, like Vicky, on GETTING TO THE BOY STUFF. This occurs right after the family has settled in at one of their first campgrounds and Daddy fights off a hood because he, you know, KNOWS JUDO.

Suzy asked, "Daddy, weren't you scared?"

"I didn't like it," Daddy said, "but most hoodlums are cowards when it comes to a showdown. They're only brave when they think you're afraid of them. Now don't let this spoil our trip, and don't let it spoil Tennessee."

"Are we to be frightened of our teen-agers?" Mother asked bitterly. "Has it come to that?"

"Vicky and I are teen-agers," John said. "You can't blame teen-agers any more than you can Tennessee. There are dopy fringe elements in every group. I wrote a paper on it for Social Studies."

Because, how awesome is it that you're on a vacation and are finally pretty and your parents are nice but constantly making you sing and you kind of like it but ISN'T ANYTHING ELSE GOING TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME and the guy across the way full STROLLS UP, ASKS YOU OUT, and is a real person, filled with contradictions, enough that your family totally hates him on sight, even though though he has his virtues and not just some weird guy trying to sleep with you:

"You've got an interesting face, Vicky," Zachary said as we walked back towards our tent. "Not pretty-pretty, but there's something more. And a darned good figure. I'd say something other than darned only I might shock little unhatched you."

"I'm not so unhatched as all that."

"No?"

"No."

"I'll bet you nothing's happened to you all your life long. Your meals have always been put in front of you and if you skin your little knee you can run crying to Mommie and Poppie and they'll kiss it and make everything all right."

Well, maybe I didn't have very much experience so far. But I was on my way to getting it.

What's most fascinating about L'Engle is how she's able to weave the actual events of the trip with great moral quandaries to the extent that an adult can, with a stretch, almost read them as parables. You could say some delinquents throw a Coke bottle at their car, or that they, like all travelers, are beset upon by thieves on the road. They either use their station wagon to drive some Girl Scouts out of a flooded canyon, or they are Noah, with an ark saving the innocents. There's a baby left in a tent with Mother, and a fallen woman who gratefully retrieves her. Vicky learns about Native Americans, a town destroyed by half the mountain, and the Holocaust, American imperialism. She sees New Mexico: "At home in Thornhill nobody is really poor, and it was awful to see the shacks and shanties and poor, foreign-looking people along the roadside. No wonder D.H. Lawrence isn't really happy in New Mexico." She sees "The Diary of Anne Frank" with Zach when the family reaches Laguna Beach. "If God lets things be unfair, if He lets things like Anne Frank happen, then I don't love Him, I hate Him!" she cries. Dude, don't hold on a second. YOU'RE GOING TO MEET ANOTHER GUY.

And enter Andy Ford, the moral redhead who does not want Vicky to see Zach anymore than Zach wants Andy to see Vicky! Eff morality, this entire book is about two guys chasing Vicky around sunlit canyons and dark, starry nights around the fire, and, though you have to actually read about three more books to see how it resolves, I would sit through any amount of secret sermonizing to find out what happens next.

"You're a funny kid," Zach tells Vicky: "a mixture of goody-goody little Miss Prunes, and quite a gal. I look forward to knowing you in five years." Trust us, Zach, there's all this crap about dolphins and lovers and telekenesis and it's AWESOME.

* Gold star to anyone who can mention when this book breaks the space-time continuum.

The Moon By Night [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan