Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

It sounds wonderful.  It’s probably the preteen nakedness that set someone off.  And it IS sad.

It would be like making the friendship between Mary and Dickon in “The Secret Garden” dirty.

I have to read this book now.  It sounds wonderful.

I can’t believe this book is on the banned books list. My 8th grade English teacher had this on her required reading list for honors.
I remember really feeling connected to the characters and their feeling of being on the outside looking in. I also remember when the meet up with the inner city school kids and the one girl tells Laura that the undies she fastened look like “hooker panties”. (yes I can remember this line and yet sometimes cannot remember if I turned the coffee pot off, I know!)

I had forgotten all about this book until now. Thanks so much!It is a truly beautifully written platonic romance.

My spaminator word: know84 - If I only knew then what I know now!

This was a favorite book of mine growing up too, and one I would turn to in times of need. I grew up in pretty strict home where my father verbally abused my mother every day. I would often wake in my room over the kitchen to them arguing at 6 am and my mother smashing plates to punctuate her sentences. When I look back on the books I loved and read and reread as a child (Kim, Beauty, The Goats) I realized I loved them because they promised an outside world one could escape to, reinvent oneself in, and find love. I wish every school library had a copy of The Goats.

I still have a copy of this book tucked away. Along with the Howie/Laura deep friendship, I also remember vividly the scene where Laura’s mother confronts the camp counselors about the ‘goat’ tradition, and the counselors try to whitewash it as all in good fun, the kids actually enjoy it, it’s one of the wacky things we do here, etc. As a middle-schooler somewhere below pond scum in the social scheme of things, I heard so many variants on that riff—“they’re just trying to make you smile! Be more friendly and they will be too! Be a good sport!” that it was wonderful to see an adult, even in fiction, call that for the bullshit it was and is.

It’s sadly funny that parents want this book banned for the brief descriptions of nudity and theft, but they completely ignore the close friendship, trust, and strength that Howie and Laura develop.

this is the banned book that i was going to do a review of. thankfully, you’ve written one much better than i would have done.
i still love this book. at one point my family owned three copies (completely unintentionally, we just found them on separate shelves sorting through the books at home a couple of years ago). i put this on as many displays as i can get away with in the bookstore i work in, just hoping new people will find it. this and the misfits by james howe are the two books that i keep hoping more people will pick up and take to heart.

Clearly, this is a book I need to read. The great thing about these reviews is that they’re helping me find books I’ve never had a chance to read (like Deenie) and making me want to read them.

(I was a weird child. I went from kids’ books to adult (Christian historical fiction—I KNOW) novels at about the age of 11, and fantasy after that, and I missed all of YA lit in between. I’ve been going back since I was 19 and trying to catch up.)

Snarkhunter isn’t the only one; I became hooked on those massive generational novels written by authors like Howard Fast when I pretty young. I can’t remember anything I read between “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Immigrants” :-). I just started reading kids’ books and YA books a couple years’ ago as I was screening reading material for my daughters.  These reviews are definitely an eye-opener for me.