(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

[pedanther]

If memory serves, Jovial Bob Stine is the credited author of the Ghostbusters II tie-in picture book, which would have been the first of Stine's books that I read. He'd started writing R.L. Stine novels by then, but I guess they felt Jovial Bob was a better match for the material.

(Hey, remember the days when every big movie got not only a novelisation but also a tie-in picture book With Actual Photos From The Movie? I think the last time I remember seeing that happen was the first Avengers movie -- that was an interesting one, the picture book only adapted the first half of the movie and stopped at the point where they caught Loki the first time.)

Oh, wait, maybe that wasn't my first. I just did a Google search and there are a couple more of Jovial Bob's books that also look familiar, I just hadn't remembered he wrote them. Man, I haven't thought about Miami Mice in decades...

[skygiants]

I had never heard the name Jovial Bob before reading this book and now I emphatically feel like I missed out!

[kore]

Heh, I remember not only when there were movie novelizations based on the script, with photo inserts, but when the movies were based on bestselling books, which were then dressed up with photo inserts and photo covers. And now we live in the age where there was a Great Expectations novelization based on the (horrible) movie....

[pedanther]

Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula and Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein both got fresh novelisations, which is particularly amusing since they were both marketed as being truer to the original text than any previous film version. The Dracula one was written by the late great Fred Saberhagen, author of The Dracula Tape. I've heard it said that he also pitched to write the Frankenstein novelisation because he was entertained by the thought of being able to write "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by the author of Bram Stoker's Dracula" on the cover.

Another odd variant which I finally got around to reading recently: the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie had a tie-in novel, with photo inserts and photo cover from the movie, written by the guy who was then writing the Superman comics... which instead of being a novelisation of the actual movie was a novelisation of his own rejected pitch for the movie.