Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  Chrysta Perretti, who hits the road after “my father called me a slut once too often, my dog was hit by a car, and I lost my virginity—what was left of it” is, unlike her milder Margaret counterpart, an abject victim of puberty, sporting a pair of breasts that cause her previously affectionate father to become suddenly hostile and the boys around her suddenly pursuant. (Her mother, not much help in either department, is a character straight from the pantheon of classic Zindel grotesqueries, obese and cloying, capable of polishing off a few packages of cinnamon roles smeared with diet margarine for breakfast.)

  But where a classic Zindel novel might evolve into still more elaborate versions of the bizarro (which, don’t get me wrong, I adore, in all their The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas glory), To Take a Dare continues in a more measured, realistic direction. This paradoxically has the effect of making Chrysta’s experiences seem more, not less, dramatic. Staring with incredulity at the white dress her parents have bought her for her birthday, one with teeny straps and a bodice that would never fit over her new body, Chrysta thinks, “This dress that my parents were giving me was made for someone else…They think they love me, but it’s not me. It’s some make-believe character called Daughter, not me.”

  There was a half bottle of catsup in the fridge. I got it out. I took that frilly white dress with its pretty pink shoulder straps and I spread it out over the kitchen table with its skirt neatly flounced out. Then I took that bottle of red, red catsup and shook it out all over that frilly white dress.

  But if the horrors of the first part of the book are made believable by their stark depiction, so too is Chrysta’s improbable rise to independence, which takes place after a number of weeks on the road force her, for purely practical reasons, to shed the bad-girl persona she’d adopted in defiance of her family:

  But gradually, my life on the road began to change me. The Punk Queen started to get edged out. First, of course, my appearance changed—you can’t wear Candie’s if you’re running down the shoulder of an interstate waving your hands excitedly because after two hours a car pulled over for you a few hundred yards down the road. You can’t wear eye makeup if your only mirror is a jagged half mirror above a dirty sink in a Mobil station at three a.m. in North Dakota and the guy driving the Hev-in-Lee Yogurt delivery truck is waiting for you outside, his radio tuned to an all-night country-and-western station for truck drivers.

  And slowly I began to feel like there was more to me than just a good body, though I wasn’t sure what. And sometimes I began to feel like somehow, I wasn’t sure how, things might work out for me.

  How they do work out—Chrysta settles in a small town in Arkansas, finds a job managing a kitchen in a hotel, and falls in love, though not without some pitfalls along the way—is, by all objective measurements, a fairy-tale ending. And it’s certainly also a far cry from even the objectively happy endings of other runaway novels, which generally involve the character having been mistaken about the suitability of her family of origin or finding a family that’s more suitable.

  But Chrysta’s story isn’t about finding her true home—she’s not a runaway, she’s a pilgrim, and like all proper pilgrims, her story has to do more with self-discovery than discovering her true family. I’ve always thought it was bold of the authors to let Chrysta go ahead and just become an adult despite her age, which, by the time she finally settles down, is a mere sixteen. Our current obsession with creating the proper environment for children to learn and grow that makes us forget that, given the right circumstances and internal resources, they cease being children at all and—even more astonishing—might become adults who are healthy, productive citizens. Maybe it is a fairly tale, but I like the idea of a character who not only escapes a bad family—but also escapes the idea that she needs a family at all.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  Caroline

  By Willo Davis Roberts 1984

  Either/Ore

  As we touch on the topic of girls who are taking their first steps toward independence, I would be remiss if I did not include a “Sunfire”—the series that sent spirited girls traipsing across juicy historical periods long before American Girl had even had a chance to fasten its bonnet. Sunfire romances, distinguished by their eponymous titles, covered everything from the Civil War to the Salem Witch Trials, to the Suffrage era, but I am an unabashed fan of Caroline—oh, spunky, sun-kissed Caroline!—the girl who cuts off her hair and sports boys’ clothing in order to follow her brothers to California, where they’ve joined that long wagon train to the Gold Rush. God knows what beach shack or dentist’s office I swiped Caroline from, but by the end of several reads, I was as intimately familiar with the particulars of Gold Rush-era underthings and panning for gold as I was with the notoriously difficult nature of young love.

  As the novel commences, it’s not exactly clear whether Caroline’s decision to not stay at home like a good girl instead of going off after them is motivated by curiosity, orneriness, or pure spite—“That’s what everybody says anytime I want to do anything! If they wanted me to be one of those wishy-washy females, somebody should have thought of it before now.” Still, her wise decision to do it in the guise of a boy means the reader can sidestep such tedious assertions of equality for a while and just concentrate on whether or not she’s going to get caught.

  Because, Reader, can Caroline’s womanly curves be restrained by the merest straps and loose clothing? Can her smooth, dimpled face and hands belong to anyone secreting large amounts of testosterone? Can those charming curls cease beguilingly escaping and be brutally shorn to ordinary fuzz, and can she convince strangers that that soft, husky voice belongs to a young boy instead of one who is nearly a woman? Sure, whatever. But discovery isn’t the thing Caroline has to worry about. Quoth the cover’s tagline: “Her disguise would keep her safe, but not from love.”

  Ah yes! For, in Twelfth Night-style, Caroline is the confidante and right arm of another wagon-train inhabitant, Dan Riddle, virile and vital, who’s also fond of the bright young boy—he thinks—he’s taken under his brawny wing. This is inconvenient, as Caroline is full-on crazy in love with him. Night after night, she dreams of telling him, but she cannot—not only because it would expose her as a girl and get her kicked off the trail, but because it would reveal her to be a liar. What man, Reader, could love a liar? (Remember, she’s safe from everything: but love.) One night, she finally puts on girls’ clothes and steps out into a dance in her beloved’s arms—thus imprinting herself on him enough that, 18 chapters later, he’s still in love with the mysterious girl when he learns she’s his young charge. Conveniently, the mysterious girl has also just happened on the biggest gold mine in creation, and everyone is too drunk with money to wonder about why Dan took the young boy under his wing in the first place.

  Chapter 3

  Danger Girls

  I Know What You Did Last Summer (Reading)

  Partners in Crime

  Of all the mischief one worries your average young woman might get up to, being at the center of a conspiracy—vast! even multinational!—seems low on the list. (Stealing a sister’s best dress, boosting a few lipsticks from Rite Aid, or making an old drunk buy her and some buddies a six-pack is probably closer to the conventional vision.) But, as fans of Lois Duncan, Ellen Raskin, or Robert Cormier know, the lives of young women and men can be as fraught with secrets both large and small, and as rocked by their revelations as any White House scandal.

  The Westing Game may be the most beloved of mysteries for girls—and not only because it brought us the miraculous Turtle Wexler, braid flying behind as she bikes away from Samuel Westing’s mansion, having spent her afternoon checking up on a dead man, but also because it was a sophisticated and hilarious send-up of a group of a adults as flummoxed by their own lives as by the clues they’re given. We also have a character like Cormier’s Adam Farmer, a pawn in a horrible game who can’t avoid being taken. Then there’s Duncan’s Daughters of Eve, which dissects feminism even as, Crucible-like,
it teaches us the dangers of the mob. And then there is L’Engle’s Dragons in the Waters and The Arm of the Starfish, which somehow manage to combine cellular regeneration, ancient Indian tribes, helpful limo drivers, and the very nature of good versus evil with fisherman sweaters and very good coffee.

  Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, or any other sleuth who can run rings around anything involving an old clock and a set of mysterious footprints. But these series’ delicate, ticking works are to the mysteries and thrillers herein as a Swiss watch is to a nuclear power plant. Which is to say, not only are these serious business, but the complexity of the plots is matched only by the complexity of the challenges the characters face. In each case, there’s a mystery to be solved, to be sure. But each protagonist is also a mystery to herself—and one we are just as eager to see her solve.

  BOOK REPORT

  The Westing Game

  By Ellen Raskin 1978

  Identity Theft

  The sun sets in the west (just about everybody knows that) but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

  I’ll admit up front it took me until my mid-thirties to notice the significance of that first line. But in a time wherein technology would obviate the plot points of most teenage reads, I can only be grateful for my continuing obtuseness. It’s bad enough that the cell phone would have killed Are You in the House Alone, or e-mail allowed L’Engle’s Zachary Gray to simply send Vicky Austin opaque, enraging e-mails rather than showing up to coolly manipulate her in the flesh. I’d like to think Harriet M. Welsch, dedicated as she was to the power of the pen, could have resisted the glories of Facebook. But could the sleek inner assembly of The Westing Game, dependent on clues written, like highly absorbent cuneiform, on papyrus-like scraps of paper towel, ever have survived the gear-revealing powers of Google? Just try plugging in “FRUITED PURPLE WAVES FOR SEE” to any search engine, and see for yourself.

  The story of—stay off Google! Then it won’t ruin things to tell you what it’s the story of—a ragtag group who is lured into renting apartments in a luxury apartment building under false pretenses, The Westing Game is a complex thriller to solve a murder—that of the multimillionaire Sam Westing, of Westing Paper Products, whose nearby mansion—and wide-flung life—casts a great shadow over all the tenants’ lives.

  Anyway, the new tenants of the building are as follows (at great—patience, please—length): The Wexler family, made up of mother and social climber Grace; father Jake, a bookie; daughter Angela, a beautiful fiancée of Denton Deere, med student; and her sister, Turtle, a clever shin kicker; the Hoo family, comprising Shin Hoo, proprietor of the building’s unsuccessful Chinese restaurant; his son Doug, a long-distance runner; and his non–English-speaking second wife, Mrs. Hoo; Theo Theodorakis and Christos Theodorakis, aspiring writer and crippled birdwatcher, respectively, sons of the proprietor of the building’s only successful restaurant, a Greek diner; Flora Baumbach, an unnervingly grinning dressmaker; Berthe Crow, a devoutly religious cleaning lady; Judge J. J. Ford, non-Magical Negro and judge; Otis Amber, idiot delivery boy; Barney Northrup, seething building manager; and Sandy McSouthers, the genial doorman. I am probably forgetting someone. Yes, secretary Sydelle Pulaski! Well, she was the mystery’s “mistake” anyway.

  Anyone with Asperger’s has solved this whole thing by now, but let’s continue for the rest of us.

  The book commences as follows: the players learn of their mysterious fate—though not of the other players’ connections to Westing—after the mysterious death of the man in question. Called to the mansion, they are declared heirs, then split into teams and given a series of five seemingly unrelated clues written, such as Flora and Turtle’s SEA MOUNTAIN AM O (which, incidentally, would have had yielded nothing helpful on Google at all). The players’ object, with this scarce matter, is to find Westing’s murderer. The prize is his 200-million-dollar fortune.

  What follows is less an And Tween There Were None than a Shakespearean farce, mainly because—aside from the fact that Turtle is the only tween—as the mystery unfolds, Raskin is less concerned with the exigencies of the plot as with the particulars of her characters. It’s not a mistake that the first task of the heirs is to write down their professions. Angela Wexler, to the consternation of her fiancé, writes “none” (“Just what did Angela mean by nun?”) while her mother chooses the more optimistic “heiress.” As we will learn, Sam’s murderer is not the only mystery. The players are, deliberately or subconsciously, hiding their true identities as well:

  Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

  Alongside the sonorous tones of intrigue lies a subtler theme: All of the players are gripped by identity crises. Grace is terrified her clunky, explicitly ethnic maiden name, Wind-kloppel, will be somehow revealed. Turtle knows her mother likes her less than Angela, who is emotionally paralyzed by how no one ever refers to anything but her looks or her impending marriage. Judge J. J. can’t get over the fact that her education—and career—was orchestrated by the tyrant Westing, while Flora is haunted by guilt over the death of her disabled daughter. Speaking of disabled, Chris is mortified by his constantly flailing limbs, while Sydelle is triumphant over finally being noticed after a lifetime of secretarial invisibility.

  But the tedious idea that we are a triumphant multi-culti pot of unity is not Raskin’s lesson. Instead, we see our culture’s (generally humorous) warts: Mr. Hoo added the “Shin” because he thought it would make him sound more Chinese, Jake notes Grace conveniently forgets he’s a Jew, people talk to Chris like he’s 5, and Grace compliments Mrs. Hoo for being so “doll-like and inscrutable,” then makes her hors d’oeuvres in a cheongsam. (I can’t blame Raskin for the straight-from-P.C.-central-casting role of the female black judge—she’s not responsible for Law & Order running it into the ground.)

  While The Westing Game is a wonderful, fun mystery, it’s also a profound meditation on how humans, given a set of clues, miss what’s actually missing right in front of them, and instead project themselves onto the negative space. In future financier Turtle’s case, she’s convinced her clues represent stock picks—as Theo studies chemistry, he becomes convinced they’re an equation. Grace Wexler is so intent on proving she’s Sam Westing’s niece she doesn’t even notice she actually is Sam Westing’s niece, and in the unfolding of their race to the finish, J. J. can only see the outlines of the chess moves with which Sam repeatedly defeated her as a girl when she lived in his mansion as the daughter of the maid.

  But these self-generated projections don’t trap the participants—they’re the keys to their freedom. At the last reading of the will, the sheaf of paper mysteriously defines them all not as what they’ve been but as what they’ve become: Turtle, financier; Flora, dressmaker; Theo, writer; Doug, champ; Mr. Hoo, inventor; Grace, restaurateur; Jake, bookie; Mrs. Hoo, cook; Angela Wexler, person. The real Sam Westing will die many years from now on the Fourth of July, but the will wishes the assembled a happy Fourth—to their great confusion—for another reason: For all of the residents of Sunset Towers, the end of the game is Independence Day.

  BOOK REPORT

  Daughters of Eve

  By Lois Duncan 1979

  Mad Libbers

  The calendar placed the first day of fall on the twenty-third of September, and on the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-second, Ruth Grange walked slowly down Locust Street, her schoolbooks gripped by one hand, a brown paper sack by the other.

  As I hit the midpoint of my third decade, I’m finally willing to admit that a large portion of my righteous indignation at the crimes of malekind stems not from things I’ve actually experienced, but from repeated, late-night readings of Daughters of Eve. Certainly the novel itself engenders eno
ugh rage at the patriarchy to fuel nationwide bra burnings. In a rare supernatural-free narrative (okay, there’s one psychic character), Daughters of Eve, on the surface, is the story of Irene Stark, dark-browed, dark-hearted feminist faculty advisor, who leads her 10 unenlightened, high-school-aged charges into a twisted version of women’s liberation. But despite Duncan’s admirable efforts at parity, what emerges is only an unforgettable portrait of rank injustice.

  We find the pre-lib girls ensconced in Modesta, California—a town whose name itself denotes placid submission—at the beginning of the school year, in the act of inducting three new sisters into the Daughters of Eve sorority. There are, as I’ve said, 10 of them, but let’s keep our eyes on the big hitters: Bambi Ellis, an icy (is there any other kind?) homecoming queen; Ann Whitten, a dreamy artiste; Tammy Carncross, resident Cassandra; Fran Schneider, budding scientist; and the three novitiates: Ruth Grange, household drudge, Laura Snow, sweet, chubby outcast; and Jane Rheardon, holder of a terrible secret.

  Yes, that’s seven. Stick with me here! As the book commences, Duncan takes care to establish in excruciating detail the various levels of oppression under which the girls operate. And, although her problems are the most banal, I have always sympathized profoundly with Ruthie Grange, who is forced to babysit and pick up after her three cocky, filth-producing brothers in order that her mother may work a job to feed their college funds:

  The boys’ cereal bowls from the morning sat out on the table with milk soured in their bottoms, and the egg plates were thick with yellow yolk dried onto them like cement. There was a pool of some unidentifiable liquid on the linoleum at the base of the refrigerator….