The Georgia Nicholson Books

I quite like Louise Rennison's series concerning the "confessions" of Georgia Nicholson. They're a bit silly and the details are sometime careless (last names change from book to book, and one of the tertiary friends--Ellen--seems to suddenly get a completely new characterization a few books into the series), but the stories are engaging enough that I don't get too caught up on the totally improbable conceit that these books are Georgia's diaries. For example, some minute-by-minute breakdowns suggest that Georgia is whipping out the diary during classes or assemblies, field hockey games, in between dances at the club, during make-out sessions. And, in fact, the bigger improbability is that a flibberti-gibbet character like Georgia would keep a diary at all, let alone in such relentless detail--the 10 books in the series apparently cover a year-and-a-half in her life (which I gathered from a throwaway line in book 10--I completely lost track of the passage of time before the series was half over).

So, I can overlook these potentially massive issues, and yet a minor, completely unimportant thing nearly sends my suspension of disbelief flying out the window. Two or three times--over the course of these ten books, mind--Georgia applies a hardening face mask, and then records her writing as though her mouth is immobile ("nuf noo nor" etc). Suddenly, I'm plunged into doubt. What the hell am I reading? Is it a diary, or something else? It is like in Dracula, when you learn Dr. Seward's diary was a phonograph recording? Are these youtube videos? Good lord, what is happening?

L.M. Montgomery

Back in the 1980s, Lucy Maud Montgomery's books all featured the same cover template, with fake-script lettering and photo-realistic(-ish) cover illustrations. Frequently, the heroine stands in tall grass in some sort of meadow, looking wistful. While I currently have a few of her books on my shelves, they are not the best examples of the mooning-in-a-meadow cover style, but it was rampant for the designs on books I originally acquired in the late eighties.


This copy of Anne of Green Gables is only about ten years old. I bought it for a university course I was taking, knowing that my original copy was a) an eight-hour trip away from my school and b) in lousy shape, the cover having pulled off years earlier. My original copy (from Scholastic) had a photo from the 1985 mini-series, but showed a nearly identical scene to this illustration--a kid, in a hat, clutching her carpet bag at the train station. (Although, Megan Follows may have been sitting on the bench that is behind illustration-Anne, here.)

This isn't a bad or cheesy cover, and probably would have solved some of my childhood puzzlement over what a "carpet bag" might be. Looks like what I imagined wasn't too far off (i.e. a bag made of a rug).





This cover is closer to the standard Montgomery cover-concept I described in my first paragraph: costumed girl in the foreground, a building of some kind (school house or beloved family home, usually) in the background, a prominent tree or treeline, a field in which we find our heroine knee-deep. Usually, the heroine is a little further back than Anne, here, more indistinct, and certainly not looking directly at the reader.

This setting does suit the character of Anne. It starts getting absurd when it is slapped on any female character Montgomery every wrote. See: Pat, Valancy, etc. This is, however, one of the worst illustrations of Anne I've seen on these books. That nose just isn't working for me.





This is a copy of a Montgomery book that I 've had since I was a child, and it seemed pretty unusual to me at the time, both because of the relatively abstract cover illustration, and because of its size--trade paperback. At the time, I don't think mass market trade paperbacks were all that common. It seemed like that format really caught on about ten years later.

I honestly didn't like this cover when I was a kid. The colour scheme is a bit garish, and of all the possible characters that might have been used to represent the book, I didn't understand why the artist settled on Gay Penhallow (I think--at least, Gay's the only character who could be described as girlish, like the young lady picture here), whose story I found both dull and aggravating. I liked Donna and Peter's story best.




This book was second-hand, so I can't take all the blame for the fact that it's held together with a rubber band. (The damage is to the spine, so the book is in two hunks). This is the best of the covers, I think. It's original compared to the photo-realistic Anne of Green Gables, and the illustration is suggestive of the book's content. As a bonus, the colour may be lime(ish)-green, but it's hasn't reached the 1970s level of garishness of my A Tangled Web's orange.

It's also probably the book I like best now, as an adult. It's contrived to the point of goofiness but it's a very charming story. Valancy is a more interesting character than Anne, and a little less annoying than Emily sometimes could be. (After the first book in her series, Anne could be a little too good, and Emily is sometimes embarrassingly intense in the way of self-consciously artsy girls in any era.)

Horror for Young People

When I was in grade school, I was a fan of Urban Legend books, of true crime stories, and of those ghost story anthologies aimed at, say, 8 to 10 year olds—Alvin Schwartz’s books are a good example of the genre (and I notice they are also on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books List of 1990-2000.)

I can’t recall if Schwartz’s books were strictly fiction or if they were marketed as “True Ghost Stories.” I read more than one of the "true" ghost story type, running into the same eight or nine ghosts that could be "proved" somehow, e.g. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, whose name is imprinted in my brain forever because of seeing that same photograph a dozen times in different scary books.

I was too old to have much interest in R.L. Stine—his Goosebumps books got hugely popular when I was already reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz and similar popular adult horror novelists' works. I did read a few of his teen-oriented Fear Street books, but even they seemed "young" for me before I started high school. I couldn't name a single title or storyline from book in the series now. In grades seven and eight I was reading other one-off young adult titles by a variety of authors, usually the ones issued with similar cover templates by Scholastic, circa the late 1980s. (This page on Amazon shows the kind of cover I remember, but if you try the “Closer Look” option, it reverts to the more recently issued covers.) The design decision was a smart move on Scholastic’s part, because I was always willing to give a book with that kind of cover a shot, even though I knew nothing of the author or plot.

I’ve forgotten most of those books, with the exception of the Christina series by Caroline B. Cooney, which were very oddly written compared to most of the teen horror books circulating around that time—Cooney was working hard to develop atmosphere and a specific setting in detail (coastal Maine), and the books include some passages that were practically experimental writing, to the eyes of a twelve-year old. I do also remember the book Prom Dress by Lael Littke, which is, of course, about a cursed prom dress. Even on my first reading of that one, the premise didn’t strike me as all that terrifying—it’s a dress, not a vampire. Put it in a bonfire if you really think it’s cursed. Job done. I recall that book mainly because one scene involves a badly injured girl, still in the (cursed) dress, arriving at the hospital, whereupon a nurse—a grown woman—is so overcome with the (cursed) beauty of the dress that she takes care not to cut it off the injured girl. Then she steals it. There’s a lot of dress-stealing in that book.