“Twilight,” shmilight. Any self-respecting Gen-X’er will proclaim, with a certain nostalgic twinge: The books we read as kids were better.
Of course, we’re showing our age, but it’s impossible to think of our childhoods without giving a major nod to Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, Robert Cormier and other young-adult novelists of the 1960s and 1970s whose writings brought the world into focus and helped to shape our souls.
It’s these classics that Lizzie Skurnick reminisces about so fondly in “Shelf Discovery,” a “reading memoir” in which she waxes philosophic about 73 favorites from an era when Bonne Bell baby powder perfume and lemon Lip Smackers reigned supreme.
For Skurnick, these books marked a turning point in young adult literature for girls. It was a genre that in earlier decades may have featured young women but didn’t really deal with their “issues.” Messy topics such as menstruation, self-esteem, sibling rivalry, bullying and divorce were taboo until titles such as “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” and “I Am the Cheese” came along.
What was different about young adult books from those of the early 1960s until the late ’80s is that they allowed young women to see themselves “in the actual girl,” Skurnick writes. These books “challenged us, like the best of friends … not only to be ourselves, but to be more interesting, inspired versions of ourselves.”
Link to book
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading