Let's Talk About Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction

I can clearly remember the first piece of tween fiction I ever read, and it was Teacher's Pet, the second book in the Sweet Valley Twins series featuring Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield as sixth-graders.

I remember going to the local public library and asking if they had any Baby-Sitters Club, which I had not read yet, but that I knew that my older cousin read.  They didn't.  My brother pointed out Teacher's Pet to me because the girls were dressed like ballet dancers on the cover. I did not then, nor did I ever, take a ballet class; we lived in the country outside of a town of about 300 people, and there were no dance classes.  However, I knew people who went out of town to take them, and a couple of my cousins took them, so I was interested in the idea of dance classes.  Anyway, so I checked out the book, loved it, and read roughly a zillion more of them in the coming years (most of them had nothing to do with ballet, by the way).  I must have only been ten years old at the time; I remember my mom saying I was only allowed to read Sweet Valley Twins and not Sweet Valley High because she thought Sweet Valley High would be too mature, but eventually (I don't remember how old I was), we were at a bookstore that only had Sweet Valley High and not Sweet Valley Twins, so my mom was like, "Oh, fine, you can have one," and I'm pretty sure in the first one I read, an older guy takes Jessica to a bar and orders her a "boilermaker," which I guess is a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser, so yeah, my mom wasn't wrong about the "too mature" thing.

Regardless, I read both series for years and years, along with The Baby-Sitters Club and some lesser-known middle school series such as The Fabulous Five, Girl Talk, Sleepover Friends, Pen Pals, and eventually, young adult series with slightly older protagonists such as Sunset Island, which featured au pairs working for rich people during the summer between high school and college, and Boyfriends/Girlfriends, later renamed Making Out, my all-time favorite, which featured a group of Maine teens living with the aftermath of a car accident that had left one person dead, one person with amnesia, and one person confessing to a crime he didn't commit.  These books were fun, quick reads with often soap operatic plots, often featuring characters with lives I either related or aspired to.  I still love to read, but I don't know if I've ever had as much fun reading as I did back then, back when there were multiple series I followed with new books that came out literally every month.  There are still boxes of these books in my parents' basement.  My mom always says someday I'm going to have to do something with them.  It would be fun if I had enough bookshelf space to display them all.

It is these books-- both the more popular ones like Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club, along with an impressive number of the more obscure ones, even some that I hadn't read-- that Gabrielle Moss chronicles in Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction.  Organized by the themes that were persistent in these books such as love, friends, family, etc., Moss explains the phenomenon of teen series fiction of the 80s and 90s, arguing that while some aspects of these books are problematic by today's standards-- they are mostly about middle- or upper-middle-class white girls, for example, alienating a large portion of their potential audience-- they were important in that they were both about and for young women, meaning that publishers acknowledged that girls' day to day lives were worth writing about and that, as an audience, pre-teen and teen girls were worth catering to.

The book even looks like some of the teen fiction from the 80s and 90s, or like a teen magazine from that era, with glossy pages featuring lots of pictures and bright colors.  It is a quick, nostalgic read, providing history and analysis of the books while also revealing some background facts, such as how the Baby-Sitters Club covers were created (fun fact: as a toddler, Kirsten Dunst modeled for Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls). 

Though I caught a couple of weird errors that should have been caught in the editing process, as a whole, the book is a great read for anyone who grew up reading these books.  Two thumbs up!