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 wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads Paul Zindel's 1969 novel 'The Pigman', in which two teens, John and Lorraine, discover that life is no day at the zoo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Let's have fun!"

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

• • • • • •

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

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

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

xx a.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Endings Are All Alike

then

Stranger With My Face

then

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'A Wrinkle In Time', Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel of Meg Murry, who is too young to have wrinkles.

It was a dark and stormy night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My faults!" Meg cried.

"Your faults."

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

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

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

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

She could love Charles Wallace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—

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

Now, for this week's Plotfinder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Love is One of the Choices', Norma Klein's 1978 novel of close encounters of the first kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • • • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier: The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'The Girl With The Silver Eyes', Willo Davis Roberts' 1980 book about a girl in search of silver-eyed bookworms.

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

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

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

When we first meet Katie, her grandmother Welker has just died, and she's been returned to the custody of her mother, Monica — living in splendor in the apartments you see pictured to your left. Her time with her grandmother as a young girl, however, was by no means sanguine, as Katie's ability to float Social Security checks in from the mailbox to the dining room table without moving rattled the old lady beyond reason:

It had taken her awhile to learn how to be careful about what she moved. She knew the name for the moving, now; she'd read it in a book [more on that later!]. Telekenesis.

As time went on, this peculiar ability of Katie's made more and more problems between them. When Katie learned how to turn off the light from the wall switch after she'd gotten into bed and turn the pages of her book [moooooore on that later!] without touching them...and smooth her hair without using the hairbrush, she made Grandma Welker nervous.

...The same was true of the kids at school. She was good at games, but there was always someone who didn't like the way she played them. She didn't like balls coming at her....That was before she learned how to make the ball veer off to the side. She knew that could spoil a game, but somehow, like other things she did, she couldn't help doing it.

Katie's odd eyes, her controversial page-turning methods, and her champion poker face ("She knew it bothered the adults around her, the way she could keep her small face perfectly expressionless, yet it seemed the safest thing to do, most of the time") go over equally unevenly at the new apartment complex, where she alienates Mr. P, the snarly resident bachelor whom she torments with errant rocks, drives away two loathsome babysitters, and weirds out Monica's boyfriend:

"What kind of kid is this one of yours, Monica? I never saw one like her before."

He didn't lower his voice. He was one of those people who talk about kids as if they weren't there or couldn't hear. Of course, it was probably true that he'd never seen anyone like Katie. She hadn't met anyone like herself either. She wished, quite sincerely, that she would.

Katie's alienation is somewhat mitigated by two new friends: Jackson Jones, the paper-delivery boy whom Mr. P routinely stiffs, and Mrs. M, the batty old neighbor who loans Katie The Scarlet Pimpernel while Katie mind-melds with her cat, Lobo. (Brief aside: Do they still only refer to adults by the first letter of their last name nowadays? All through the 80s, I never knew any adult's *actual* last name!) Still, Katie knows she is different and it pains her — and when she overhears Monica's boyfriend Nathan put forth, in a tell-don't-show exchange too tedious to relate, the theory that Monica's exposure to a drug called Ty-Pan-Oromine while working in a pharmaceutical factory might have spawned Katie's unusual condition and that there may be others like her, she goes hunting for answers:

And if Nathan was right — Katie forgot to eat, engrossed in the idea — that she was the way she was because of the stuff Monica had worked with, what about the babies those other women had had? All about the same time as Katie herself had been born? Was Ty-Pan-Oromine responsible for her silver eyes and this ability to move things by thinking about moving them? And if it was, were those other kids like herself? Somewhere out there in the world, were there more "different" kids, who would be her own kind?

It's unsurprising that TGWTSE is a stealth favorite of readers everywhere, since it is the implicit cri de coeur of those yelled at in English classes for reading one book under the desk because they finished the assigned reading two months ago. Forget talking to cats or moving rocks across the sidewalk to smack irritating neighbors—in TGWTSE, Katie's reading, full stop, is a deeply suspicious activity:

"It's like you were drugged or something, you don't even know what's going around you," Grandma Welker used to say in annoyance about Katie's reading.

Drugged. As in, ON DRUGS, people! And that's not the worst of it:

Grandma didn't value books that much; she'd even burned one, once, when she'd caught Katie reading it after she was supposed to have been asleep. Katie had had difficulty forgiving her for that. She'd had to fish the remains out of her fireplace late at night and carefully lay out the brown pages with the charred edges to find out how it ended.

Does that make your stomach hurt? That actually makes my stomach hurt. But, as in Summer of My German Soldier, you can tell Katie's friends from her enemies by who likes words — Jackson Jones, Mrs. M — and who doesn't. That's why the letter Katie decides to send out to the probable offspring of one of her mother's old coworkers to feel out if they're co-kenetics is so stupendous:

Katie chewed on the end of her pen for a minute, wondering if she should specify anything, and decided not to.

"I like to read, and I like animals," she wrote then. "And I'd sure like to hear from you."

Likes to read, likes animals — are you a mutant too??!!?? But Katie's quest to find out if she's the only one of her kind — a quest in which she is ultimately successful — will be familiar to those who might also primarily use telekinesis to turn pages and push up their glasses without lifting a finger, too. Normal children might use telekinesis to float a ball, you know, INTO the goal. But Katie is un-bubbly, unprepossessing, happy to hang with a septuagenarian and paper boy, and completely unfamiliar with the rites of the slumber party. Left to her own devices, she'll read The Scarlet Pimpernel with one eye and diligently dissect the adults around her with another. She is, to put it briefly, A BIG NERD. Yes, just like you! Floating forks is fine, but this is sweet justice for of us who suffered having a book yanked out of our hands at the dinner table every night. In my next telekinetic life, I will float those back too.

• • • • •

Okay, so this week's Plotfinder was hard, and am actually not sure we got the answer, but let's try. Reader Ena G. seems to think the strawberry/turtle matrix may well be the The Wendy Zephyr Guide to Genuine Magick. Alison, can you confirm to jezziefinelines@gmail.com?

Moving right along, this week's Plotfinder, which I am convinced — CONVINCED! — is Bradbury, Asimov, LeGuin, or King, though our reader says no — CONVINCED!!! — comes in from Krista:

My best friend and I have been trying to figure this out for years. We read it in our fourth grade class.

There's a family of children and at least one has some sort of special power. Telekinesis, maybe? I think it's the youngest, and I think he/she also has a teddy bear in tow most of the time. The family is (I think) running from some evil being; I remember the book feeling very dark. The limited images I have when I think about it are all at night. Two big clues: a giant ferris wheel and a hotel named Stardust, or something very similar.

Not a lot to go on, but it's all I've got.

Bradbury I say!!!! Maybe Something Wicked This Way Comes! Harrumph. (Ignore me; I'm just on a Bradbury kick since being able to toss off an "All Summer in a Day" for someone else.) As always, float your guesses across the room to jezziefinelines@gmail.com while keeping your face as expressionless as possible. Also send future requests, Plotfinders and books you read under the desk in English class to same.

Next week: Norma Klein's Love is One of the Choices.

The Girl With The Silver Eyes [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: 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