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

“…Abandoned by her negligent parents…” Is this an American thing? She was 16. Her parents were out of town. I LIVED alone at 16.

WTF? Pike’s The Eternal Enemy is NOT meat-and-potatoes horror or even basic sci-fi. I am 100% convinced this author has not, in fact, read all the books she writes about.

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.