My question is: besides providing amusement to a bunch of thirtysomethings, why should anyone today (particularly a kid raised on Gossip Girl) read Fifteen? I don’t have an answer (were you expecting an answer?), except to say, semi-cryptically, that it’s a question to which maybe this blog is trying to respond. Just what career, she did not know-an airline stewardess, or a writer of advertising copy for a big department store, or perhaps a job at the American embassy in Paris-something like the girls in the pages of Mademoiselle, who always managed to be clever about clothes and to be seen in interesting places with men who had crew cuts. He said it spoiled his appetite to realize he had a pinhead for a daughter.īut first she would go to college and have a career. Just before dinner Jane took the bobby pins out of her hair, because her father did not allow her to come to the table with her hair in pin curls. I told you before I went out with him he wasn’t the type to drive around in a hot rod, throwing beer cans around.” “People like Stan and me don’t get into the papers. Marcy brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and smiled back at Jane with the kind of smile a girl riding in a convertible with a popular boy on a summer day gives a girl who is walking alone. As my friends and I took turns reading the book, much hilarity ensued over excerpts such as these:
The plot is pretty standard: Girl likes boy, girl seeks to impress boy, boy ditches girl, boy appears disinterested, girl resolves to forget boy, boy turns out to be interested after all. In Fifteen, Jane Purdy meets Stan Crandall, the new boy, while she is babysitting and he is delivering dog food. It only started to make sense when she realized that it had been written in 1956. During a recent cottage weekend, Fifteen was passed around as communal reading material, like a dirty magazine, and one of my friends became thoroughly confused by how sexist it was. For those of us who love the spunky Ramona Quimby, this is nothing short of a betrayal.Ĭleary’s four Maltshop Books (the other three are The Luckiest Girl, Jean and Johnny and Sister of the Bride) have been re-issued as modern paperback “stories of first love” with splashy pink and yellow cover art.
teen romances featuring female protagonists whose main preoccupations were The Boy That Drives A Car or The Boy That Didn’t Call. You see, back in the 1950s, before there was Ramona and Beezus and Henry and Ribsy and Ralph S. I recently discovered something about Beverly Cleary that made me look at her a bit askance, an experience akin to learning that your sweet old great-aunt used to pole-dance for a living.
0 kommentar(er)
