(no subject)

[skygiants]

osprey_archer mentioned Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Fiction a few weeks back, so I picked it up on the assumption that it would be a good light nonfiction read for a recent beach trip.

And indeed it was, and I enjoyed the survey view of the era and the nostalgia hit of flipping through endless Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club covers very much, while also very deeply craving a much more substantive and academic exploration of late-twentieth-century children's fiction -- sure, Sweet Valley High kicked off a landslide of Soap Opera Twin Story imitators, I'm glad to know this, but why was it so popular? Why and how did it cover the plotlines that it did? LET'S DIG, LET'S GET IN IT.

This book covers a lot of the broad trends, but doesn't really get in it at more than surface level. It also completely skips the categories that were most significant to me, fantasy and historical fiction, except where they overlap with the ones she's more interested in, Teen Romance and Teen Horror -- I realize the Harry Potter boom didn't happen until the early two thousands, but there were kid fantasy novels being published before then, and I read ALL of them. The boundary line in this book between what counts as 'teen' and 'kid' lit is is kind of fuzzy too and I think the definitions really depend on what Gabrielle Moss felt like writing about at the time. (For example, no American Girls, but a loving full-page spread on Wait Til Helen Comes which -- great book! Well worth calling out! NOT teen fiction, definitely a children's book.)

All that said, I learned several extremely important things from this book:

- there existed a Preteen Friends series (a la Babysitter's Club) called the B.Y. Times about a group of Orthodox Jewish girls who wrote for their school newspaper -- how did I not know about this! why have I not read all of them!
- there also existed a whole series called Swept Away, by Eileen Goudge, about teen girls who have a TIME TRAVEL CLUB (with a machine they stole from their local library! makerspaces, man) and are constantly zooming backwards to fix the love lives of Teen Girls From The Past; why did I not ALSO read all of these?
- noted horror author R.L. Stine also wrote joke books! ... under the name JOVIAL BOB Stine. I don't know why this is the funniest thing I've heard all week but every time I remember it I start laughing. Jovial Bob!
- Lois Duncan, who wrote all those teen horror and suspense books about teens and mysteries and murder ... stopped writing suspense novels after her ACTUAL teen daughter was mysteriously murdered, and instead wrote a true crime novel titled Who Killed My Daughter? based on her private investigation involving gangs and psychics! This is very sad, but also, good lord, talk about art imitating life
- on a lighter note, one last 'why didn't I read this': Samantha Slade, Monster-Sitter, "for the Goosebumps reader who wanted more babysitting, or the BSC reader who wanted more lycanthropy." I WAS BOTH THOSE THINGS. WHERE WAS I.

Anyway, now I have to go nosedive into all the Sweet Valley summaries written by dedicated scholar 1bruce1, still apparently valiantly trucking away on Livejournal after all this time.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

I felt kind of bad about wanting more from the book, because there's already so much there! And if it got more in-depth, it would probably be 800 pages! Which would not be suitable for a vacation read! But at the same time I did want it to be way more in depth about certain things. Like, maybe just iris in on the Sweet Valley books? I didn't actually read those in my youth, but the author clearly loved them and I would have loved reading an in-depth exploration of what made them so popular.

Wait Till Helen Comes was such a bizarre book to include. I mean, it's a great book! But not for teens, and also it was a standalone, not a series book. Maybe Moss just loved it so much she couldn't bear to leave it out.

[conuly]

I mean, BSC wasn't really for teens either?

[osprey_archer]

No, it also doesn't technically fit with the book's purview - the title doesn't make it clear, but the book is supposedly focused on teen series fiction. But BSC is at least a series, while Wait Till Helen Comes is neither a series nor for teens.

[skygiants]

I WANT ALL EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES THOUGH. I mean, no shade on Gabrielle Moss, who was gamely tackling a VERY broad topic, but there's so much there there to be explored!

There were a bunch of standalones she went into, and I was never quite sure whether it was because she thought they illustrated a particular point very well even though they weren't series books, or because she just really loved them and wanted an excuse to recap the plot. Or both!

[osprey_archer]

Someone below mentioned that the book felt very bloggish and I did feel as I was reading that a blog might have been a more natural fit for the material: less length restrictions than a book (you can write as many posts about Sweet Valley High as you want to!) and also I think the deviations from the teen series theme into standalone books would be less jarring in blog form. There's less expectation that a blog will stick to its THEME than a book sticking to its thesis.

[kore]

The same thing happened for me with Lizzie Skurnick's (Old Hag) Shelfreads, which was great fun as an interactive blog, and a really disappointing flop as an actual book.