Sati Marie Frost’s Reviews > Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction > Status Update

Hey, Marissa and Violet were excellent counsellors! Their kids adored them, and as importantly, they tailored their activities to the individual kids’ likes - hikes and craft stuff for Marissa’s, makeup and hair for Vi’s. I am starting to suspect the author has not read a lot of these books. (I read this one last summer, not for the first time.)

I’m pretty sure Mary Anne and Too Many Boys was book #34, not #42. I really do have a weird memory. #42 was Jessi and the Dance School Phantom, which I liked because it was a) Jessi and b) longer than most of them (but sadly did not involve any ghosts).

The only books Ms Moss actually praises are “gritty” ones. I honestly don’t know why she didn’t just write about those.

“Really, we’re the clowns for having bought this stuff, right? Am I right?”

Sometimes the feel of a book can be summed up in one sentence. This makes me rather sad.

I don’t get the author of this book, I really don’t. She looks down at books like Sweet Valley for being too dramatic and unrealistic, and looks down at other books for being too realistic and mundane and focusing on problems that are barely problems, or that she considers unimportant. Does she just not like teenagers? Or people in general?

…oh. Maybe I liked Sweet Valley because my life was genuinely dramatic, so it doesn’t read as soap opera levels of insane to me. I never considered that before.

Gabrielle Moss is funny. I do want to be clear about that. But funny people, whether comedians by trade or just “the funny one” within a group (since we’re so focused on tropes here), have to be careful not to spend all their time punching down, and if they ARE going to punch down, that humour needs to be mixed with genuine respect and affection, or it turns into meanness. I’m getting a lot of meanness here.

Instead of enjoying the vast variety of human experiences, things that are not in line with the author’s idea of “realistic” are dismissed as “soap opera” or “problematic”. Ms Moss and I seem to be at polar ends of the spectrum when it comes to what we got out of reading. My takeaway from reading as a kid/tween/young adult is that people are vast and varied, yet we all have things in common.

“For those of us who were roused early on weekend mornings for chores or church, or just didn’t have any friends to sit around eating blueberry-banana pancakes with, Sleepover Friends was the tween equivalent of reading about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Paris apartment in Architectural Digest.”

And therein lies one of my major issues with this book.