Nobody Has to Be a Kid Forever

by Hila Colman

When her parents' increasing unhappiness results in her mother's moving out, thirteen-year-old Sarah Grinnell becomes resentful and lonely

Genres: Young Adult

149 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Born in New York, Colman attended Radcliffe College where she honed her writing skills before embarking on a literary career.

Colman also wrote under the pseudonym Teresa Crayder.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of my favorite books growing up, and I think it's now out of print. It's a pretty typical story of a 13-year-old girl and her growing pains, but it has some unusual elements thrown in -- the girl's mother leaves the family to live with another woman (it's never spelled out whether the mother is bisexual) and the older sister drops out of school to live with her boyfriend. It's in diary form, which I recall was all the rage in YA novels in the 70s.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

After reading Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister, I tracked down its sequel on eBay.

One of the central conflicts in this story is between 13-year-old Sarah's parents. The mother was a pianist before having kids, and the father wanted to be a painter but became a textile designer for a steady income. The family of four lives in New York with a view of Central Park on his salary, and he didn't want his wife giving piano lessons in the first book when she had a perfectly good job raising kids. From her point of view, she wants to be more than a household drudge and has begun going to consciousness-raising meetings in this book. (Right during dinnertime. Gasp!) It still boggles my mind that it was even *possible* to make the "I don't want my wife to work" argument when living in New York. Oh, they also own a vacation house on Cape Cod. Ha! Imagine.

Another storyline that blew my mind is the older sister, Didi. Sarah's diary opens with her turning thirteen, which means that Didi just turned seventeen. (It's repeatedly mentioned in the first book that she is fifteen when Sarah is eleven.) Didi has been dating an older boy and decides to leave school after the first semester and move with him to Boston! It's all about her parents' disapproval that she lives with a boy, rather than about her only being seventeen, and leaving school. Didi's age is not mentioned at all in the second book, and I thought that was odd.

I enjoyed the story lines of Sarah's friendships Millie and Kathy, and the contrast between them.

Sarah's ideas about doing what you want and not worrying about being rich or poor felt very relatable and realistic for a young girl's understanding of the world.

There were some great lines, like this one: "I always thought if I worried about something enough it couldn't possibly turn out to be as bad as I expected. I was wrong" (9).

[Alba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viva el mercadillo de la mamo