When you allow two unapologetic young adult-fiction lovers like Courtney and myself to share an office, it’s just sort of inevitable that our workdays occasionally devolve into conversations like this one:

Courtney: Oh my god, do you remember My Sweet Audrina? That VC Andrews one-off?

Alison: God, yes. Everything I knew about sex as a 10-year-old, I learned from VC Andrews. Those books make such a good case for early childhood sex education.

Courtney: So you don’t get all traumatized after reading them and then start thinking your dad or your brother is after you.

The impetus for this conversation was the single best book blog EVER which I can’t believe I only just found out about: Jezebel’s Friday Fine Lines feature, in which bloggers take a “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.” The Westing Game! Jacob Have I Loved! (That review’s opener: “Let’s all just start crying now.”) Weetzie Bat! (Attribute this to my youth if you will, I loved that book. And the review’s headline, “The Book for Girls who Ended Up Taking a Gay Dude to Prom,” is, um, insightful.)

Here’s a question for any librarians in the audience: A lot of the books I loved as a kid were written in the ’60s and ’70s, stuff by Paul Zindel, Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, etc, so by the time I got my hands on them they’d already been out for years. Are kids today still reading these authors? The library doesn’t even have a copy of Paul Zindel’s amazing The Pigman (according to the website, anyway), and they’ve only got four copies of The Chocolate War (though a bunch more are on order, I noticed)… Just wonderin’.

And while we’re on the subject, this might just be the best powells.com book synopsis ever.

I don’t usually blog on weekends. But like OMG. From this place, by way of these people:

The relaunch of Sweet Valley High.

You MUST have heard about this.

I read about the relaunch a while back, promptly forgot* about it, and then received review copies of the first two in the mail yesterday. I read the first chapter of the very first book. (That was all I could handle at the moment. I’ll go back for more later.)

They may have changed some things — the Wakefield twins are no longer “a perfect size six”, now they’re (get ready…) “a perfect size four”** — but wow, they haven’t changed Jessica Wakefield. She’s still a bitch.

Why I have I not received copies of these? I got Dr. Laura’s new book, for eff’s sake. I am on the wrong publishers’ lists.

Re: the slimming down of the Wakefields, one Slog commentor notes;

To be fair… in the past 10 years companies have gradually changed sizing so that what was a size 6 10 years ago is now a size [4]. So, actually the Wakefields stayed the same height and weight, but Gap just changed their sizing.

Also, since this IS a Girls Only post, I am at Tiny’s at the people at the table next to me are having a blind internet date. Hee hee.