The Girl is...thinking about young adult books

We interrupt our normal blog about World War II popular culture, for this brief commercial: I have books. Beautiful, shiny new books. And next Saturday, you can have one too, if you join me for the launch of The Girl is Murder at Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, PA at 2:00 PM. We’ll be celebrating with locally brewed root beer and cream soda, and other assorted treats.

Here’s a quick blurb for those of you who aren’t familiar with my spanking new series:

It's the Fall of 1942 and Iris's world is rapidly changing. Her Pop is back from the war with a missing leg, limiting his ability to do the physically grueling part of his detective work. Iris is dying to help, especially when she discovers that one of Pop's cases involves a boy at her school. Now, instead of sitting at home watching Deanna Durbin movies, Iris is sneaking out of the house, double crossing her friends, and dancing at the Savoy till all hours of the night. There's certainly never a dull moment in the private eye business.

And here’s a little praise:

“What makes this such a standout is the cast. Sounding like they’re right out of the 1940s (well, a 1940’s movie, anyway), the characters, young and old, pop off the pages. Iris, intriguing and infuriating, captures the tension inherent in the teenage years, no matter what the decade. This joint is jumping.” —Booklist, Starred Review

I know what you’re thinking: I’m a grown up. Why would I buy a young adult book unless I was getting it as a gift for a young adult?

Allow me to dispel a few misconceptions about what Young Adult means in the book world:

1.     Young Adult books are only for young adults. While you can be too young to read young adult (see picture at right), you can never be too old. If Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have taught us nothing else, it’s that good stories transcend age.

2.     Young adult means vampires and other supernatural beasties. Look, I know that certain books containing sparkly, moody vampires have been enormously popular and have done much to get previously reluctant readers to turn to books for their entertainment. I don’t begrudge them a bit. But if you’ve avoiding reading YA because you think that’s all young adult fiction has to offer, fear not – there are a lot of amazing stories out there with nary a hint of the supernatural.

3.     Young adult means rudimentary writing. Now there are some fighting words! Some of the most exquisite writing I’ve encountered has been in the YA world. Sure, the writing tends to be more compact, the stories more immediate, but that’s hardly a flaw.

4.     Young adult means preachy morals and sanitized plots. Maybe back in the day when Go Ask Alice was all the rage (and even then, while there was a preachy plot, there was hardly a sanitized one – sex and drugs – oh my!), but today’s young adult novels are far from heavy-handed morality tales. Sure, some of the best contain a takeaway for the reader, but that’s hardly the only thing they contain. And the stories are much more sophisticated than you might believe. It’s not all brooding high school students worried about what to wear to the prom. The best characters emulate real people – with all their flaws, naughty words, and bad decisions firmly intact. 

5.     People will judge me for reading kids books. Um, no. Just no. And if you’re that concerned about what the nameless, faceless masses think, get a kindle (it’s harder to figure out what someone’s reading when there’s no cover) or remove the dustcover from another book and disguise it with that.  I recommend War and Peace. What could sound more adult than that?

Look, YA might not be for you and that’s okay. But keep in mind that like most divisions in the publishing world, the YA designation can often feel arbitrary, assigned to a book because of the age of the characters rather than because of their level of sophistication.

Got a YA recommendation to get someone started? Hit the comments!

The Girl is....watching movies

When I was a kid, my mom bombarded my sister and me with films from the 1930s and ‘40s (with an occasional one from the ‘50s and ‘60s). I think, in her mind, it was a way of keeping us from the sex and violence of more contemporary movies, although truth be told there was just as much sex and violence, it just tended to start onscreen and quickly move off. Too poor for cable, I was initially reluctant to enjoy these Friday night black and white Blockbuster picks (couldn’t we at least get a movie in…gasp…color?), but I eventually fell in love with them. There’s something about the clothes, the dialogue, the music, the everything that made these films so much more of a fantasy than things being released in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I yearned to talk like the women who populated these films, to move with their slinky grace and assurance, to express emotion with a raised eyebrow, a flick of  a cigarette, and a single tear that fell without making my face red and my nose run.

Yeah, they had style. They had grace. 

And now that I have access to AMC and TCM I get to indulge in my love of all things Old Hollywood whenever I want. Here are a few of my favorites:

Stage Door (1937). Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers. A group of girls inhabit a boarding house for actresses in New York and go through the trials and tribulations of becoming stars. Katharine Hepburn as the rich girl playing poor lured me in, but it’s Ginger Rogers with her fast patter and fantastic dance steps that makes me keep coming back to this movie. The dialogue zings, but as funny of a movie as it is, it’s got an emotional one-two punch at its center. This is the movie that inspired my Rosie Winter mystery series set among (you guessed it) actresses living in a New York boarding house.

Philadelphia Story (1940). It’s my namesake, Katharine Hepburn again, this time paired with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. More razor sharp dialogue (both Stage Door and Philadelphia Story were originally plays and it shows) as Hepburn’s Tracy Lord gets ready to remarry despite unresolved feelings for her ex, Cary Grant. While the three top billed stars are amazing, it’s the supporting cast I love in this film, especially Virginia Weidler as precocious Dinah Lord and acerbic Ruth Hussey as a love-lorn, wise-cracking photographer.

His Girl Friday (1940). The plot is similar to Philadelphia Story, but this time its Rosalind Russell’s fast-talking reporter that Cary Grant is trying to keep from remarrying, while she gets roped into the biggest story of her career. Another play turned film, what’s intriguing isn’t just the marvelous, quotable dialogue but the fact that Russell’s part (in the play, The Front Page) was originally written for a man and the romance angle wasn’t added until this film. 

All About Eve (1950). This time it’s Bette Davis in the lead in a film about an up and coming actress (Anne Baxter) who’s trying to usurp the career of one of theater’s grande dames. Witty, gut-wrenching, agonizingly frustrating, this is the movie that made me finally understand why Bette Davis was a star. Bonus points: it was Marilyn Monroe’s first film.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). This is my sole World War II entry (thought there’s a lot of other films I could list), but this is the one that really got me thinking about the war and its impact on the homefront and those who were left behind. The movie follows three vets as they return home and find their lives irreparably changed. Harold Russell, a real vet who lost both his hands in the South Pacific, won an Oscar for this, his film debut. It’s one of the few films that deals with what came after the war and how difficult it was for the returning vets to slip back into the lives they’d left four years before.

How ‘bout you? Got a favorite old movie you’d like to suggest?

The Girl is...thinking about Deanna Durbin

In The Girl is Murder, teen sleuth, Iris Anderson, and her friends are obsessed with actress Deanna Durbin (born 1921), so much so that Iris belonged to her fan club and her former best friend kept a scrap book of clippings about the actress. So who was Deanna Durbin and why were so many young women drawn to her?

Durbin was a child star known for playing the “ideal teenage daughter” in films like Every Sunday and Three Smart Girls. Like Judy Garland, she was also a singer and frequently sang in her films.  In 1939 she shared the Academy Awards Juvenille Award with Mickey Rooney for ""for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players, setting high standards of ability and achievement." There was a large variety of merchandise sold to cash in on her, including Deanna Durbin dolls and dresses. In fact, by the time she turned twenty-one, she was the highest-paid woman in the United States and highest-paid female film star in the world.

Take that, Lindsay Lohan.

As Durbin entered the 1940s, she yearned to become a woman on film just as she was becoming a woman in real life, but like many child stars she had a hard-time transitioning into more sophisticated roles since her fans preferred her in light, comedic parts. She ultimately ended up retiring from acting in 1949, when she was only 28 years old. In her only interview after her retirement, granted in 1983, she explained that while she loved performing and working in film,  "What I did find difficult was that this acquired maturity had to be hidden under the childlike personality my films and publicity projected on me.” She also bemoaned the bad quality of the films she was making in exchanging for so much money. You can read the whole interview here.

Durbin inspired one of the largest, most devoted fan clubs in history (and fans are still out there -- just take a look at the comments on the youtube clips featuring her). Among the teenage girls who worshipped her was Anne Frank, who had a picture of the actress hanging in the room where her family hid during World War II. Durbin was also fictionalized in two novels, where the actress was a Nancy Drew-like character. She was also Winston Churchill's favorite actress.

Here's a clip of fifteen year old Deanna singing "I Love to Whistle" in the 1938 film Mad About Music.

The Girl is...thinking about Zoot Suits.

A friend reminded me that today is the anniversary of the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots. That seems like an excellent way to kick off my brand spankin’ new blog!

Zoots figure prominently in The Girl is Murder, the first Iris Anderson mystery which comes out in just a few brief weeks. In my case the suits in question are being donned on the East Coast in 1942. 

So what were zoot suits? The large, baggy suits with tapered pants, padded shoulders, and made of loud fabrics (bright colors, huge pinstripes) were worn by youth during the 1930s 1940s and became closely associated with jazz music and swing dancing, since so many of those who donned them also frequented swing clubs (they were also style de riguer for the musicians in these clubs). The majority of those who wore the “zoot” were Mexican-American, African-America, and Italian-American youth, people on the fringe, so to speak, who were looking to express themselves and to remind society that they knew they were outsiders. They spoke in swing slang, wore their watches on long waist chains, and roamed together with like minded peers.

Sounds pretty innocent, right? But the suit wasn’t just a costume. It became a symbol for a lot of complex things. The war changed families. With fathers gone and mothers working, delinquency was on the rise because there was no one at home to monitor young people’s behavior. The zoot became associated with this lawless youth, a new class of criminals committing petty crimes out of boredom. And because these suits were oversized and involved a lot of fabric, which was a luxury during war since fabric needed to be used to make military uniforms, purchasing and wearing the zoot was seen as an act of national defiance, a wasteful way of thumbing your nose at the war effort (in fact, you had to go to a back alley tailor to even get them made). And that’s what ultimately led to the clash between soldiers and the zoot suiters in LA, and similar, riots in other parts of the country. 

And now a musical interlude: