Lost… And Never Found By Anita Larsen

In ten unbelievable tales we can find out who these people were, before they vanished- without a trace.

Do kids still go through an Unsolved Mysteries of the Unknown phase? Even if it no longer directly involves Unsolved Mysteries or Mysteries of the Unknown?

My childhood local library conveniently gathered everything paranormal, psychic powers, UFO, Big Foot, mysterious disappearances and so on under the “Occult” section, which during the peak Satanic-Panic years was basically an invitation to middle schoolers to scare themselves silly.

I picked up this book at a small charity thrift store in upstate New York, which seems to get a steady supply of some of the most obscure YA and Middle Reader series of the 1980s and 90s. One of the names in the list of “cases” profiled caught my eye and I thought I might have found a relic of the peak of the “you-are-totally-going-to-get-kidnapped-and-murdered” era, which it is not quite.

Still, that non-descript cover is strangely menacing, right? I think I figured out it is because it reminds me of the cover of Alive.

Some Highlights: The book actually retells the stories of 10 historical unsolved missing persons cases, ranging from the most famous to the too-obscure-for-Wikipedia, dating from 1854 to 1982.

Windswept Mystery-Romance #26: The Secret By Carol Beach York.

Was the ghost of a dead girl seeking revenge?

Teen romances with a photo cover were a staple throughout the 1980s: we have variously looked at Wildfire, Sweet Dreams, First Love and Caprice’s versions of this YA staple on a regular basis. Occasionally publishers would get creative, and try out a new format, like the he said/she said Two By Two series, or the Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired Follow Your Heart books.

At some point a reader recommended Scholastic’s Windswept imprint, which billed itself as “A Mystery Romance”…

…But first things first, what do you think? Is that a young Meg Ryan on the cover? At this point in her career, she was appearing on the daytime soap As The World Turns, so it doesn’t seem out of the question that she would be taking some book modeling or stock photography gigs. YA covers are how Courtney Cox and Amanda Seyfried got their starts!

Windswept books featured a number of Scholastic house writers; York was last featured here with the forgettable Nothing Ever Happens Here, a teen-girl coming-of-age story that abruptly throws in a contract killing in the last few pages. I was not expecting much from this one.

The Plot: So, I was surprised and delighted to find The Secret was a spooky gothic mystery that downplays the romance aspect and instead maintains the chilly mood as it slowly reveals the source of cousins Elizabeth and Carrie’s guilt over an incident that transpired the previous Christmas.

Choose Your Own Adventure #42: The Mystery of Echo Lodge By Louise Munro Foley

Be on the lookout! Echo Lodge is surrounded by danger. You may be attacked by a killer hawk, get trapped under a roaring avalanche, or save the day by solving the mystery! 

I truly appreciate that readers indulged my flight into the early 90s with Generation X two weeks ago- this week we are back to our core competencies, and it involves weird 1980s PBS series, The Bookmobile and highly commercial paperbacks targeted at young readers.

Background: The brainchild of writers Edward Packard and R. A. Montgomery, the Choose Your Own Adventure series was first published locally in Vermont in the mid-1970s; when they sold the concept to Bantam in 1979 the series blew up, becoming inescapable at school libraries, book fairs and bookstores.

“You’re the star of the story! Choose from (#) possible endings!” famously proclaimed the covers, luring readers into the second-person narratives in which every few pages the reader would be asked to make a choice (“If you warn the guests, turn to page 37. If you start scrubbing potatoes, turn to page 105”) and live with the consequences of your actions, “creating” a totally different plot upon each reading.

An Annoying Autobiographical Pause: I came to CYOA through that bastion of 70s and 80s weirdness: daytime programming on my local Public Broadcasting Station. I feel like maybe we have forgotten exactly how, by turn, strange, radical and cheap-looking PBS kids programing was originally. While the kids I babysat for now fondly recall Wishbone and Ghostwriter… you have to belong to a very different and specific generational cohort to wake up in a cold sweat yelling “Palabra jot! Palabra jot!”

But I digress.

Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture By Douglas Coupland

“Everyone’s such a mess. Nobody turned out normal.”

When selecting titles for this space, I try to think of “young adult” in as expansive a way possible: not just as a marketing category as to who publishers thought would read a book, but also who was actually reading the books- it is the one point I have been (very, very rarely) taken to task for over the past 12 years: “__________ (book and/or author) isn’t YA!”

I was finishing up Coupland’s book while in the midst of a totally unrelated research project when I came across a quote from the great Samuel Z. Arkoff, longtime head of  American-International Pictures, on the (non-AIP) Beach Party movie For Those Who Think Young (1964), a project financed by PepsiCo, featuring  heavy product placement and using Pepsi’s new slogan as its title: “What kid would go to see a film called For Those Who Think Young?”

What self-respecting 20-something in 1991 would want to be labeled “Generation X”? I mean, possibly none, but it strikes me both in concept and content as something that would be regarded as aspirational by the younger members of that cohort, the teenagers.

Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley Saga: The Wakefields of Sweet Valley

Follow the riveting stories of the women who came before Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield…

Did any 1980s series spawn more sub-series than Sweet Valley High? Even excluding the hundreds of books featuring the Wakefield twins at different ages (your Sweet Valleys Kids, Twins, Junior High, University… and also that short lived series where they join the Olympic gymnastics and beach volleyball teams as middle schoolers…)

The original Sweet Valley High series ran for 143 volumes published over 15 years (a terrifyingly long time to stay in high school, even if you are a perfect size six with aquamarine eyes). In addition to the mainline series, there were also the Super Editions (twice as thick as the regular paperbacks, often set over school vacations); Super Thrillers (twice as thick with MURDER); Super Stars (twice as thick, focusing on supporting characters both important [LILA FOWLER!!!] and baffling as why they rated a whole backstory [Olivia…?]); and finally the Magna Editions, three times the size and focusing on only the most important aspects of the Pascalverse, such as secret diaries and evil twins (and the evil twin’s evil twin).

Background: The Magna Editions kicked off with a volume (later a quartet of books) detailing the twins matrilineal line… which turns out to be a 120-year series of missed connections, as fate conspires to keep the future Alice Wakefield’s ancestors from marrying the future Ned Wakefield’s ancestors (if you need to brush up on your SVH lore, I am still recommending this overview).

The Plot: In a very Sunfire opening, we are introduced to 16-year-old Alice Larson, recently orphaned and “Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean”. The year is 1866, and Alice is en route from her native Sweden to join her aunt and uncle in New York.

Sunset High: The Night Before (#10) By Linda A. Cooney

Will they spend the holidays apart, or will they set aside their pride in time to start the New Year right?

I am starting to run low on holiday-themed YA titles (whither Elaine Harper?) so I’ve been reaching for a lot of short-lived 80s and 90s series in recent years. This is not one I read as an actual YA, and there is not a lot of information out there about this series. It is another created by Linda A. Cooney (last seen here with Freshman Christmas, and the creator of several barely-remembered series of the era); however, the credited author is the prolific Barbara Steiner, who wrote for Sweet Dreams, Windswept and Point Thrillers.

Background: You know how I’m always complaining about picking up a volume in the middle of the series and the author doesn’t even do us the favor of a Babysitters Club-style recap of who all of these characters are and what their deal is? This book does NOT have that problem! In fact, this book is about 95% recap! In fact, this could be a whole new template for YA series, where an entire series just turns into a mobius strip of constant recapping.

The plot and characters are so derivative of other 80s series and tropes that it actually accomplishes some kind of… genre purity? It is well-written enough that I became deeply invested in the low-stakes, high-drama dilemmas of the 50 or so characters involved in the plot.

The Plot: While the back cover copy focuses heavily on the love triangle between JT (that’s Janet Terry) Gartner, sad-sack Will Patton and resident bad boy Denis (one N) Daniels, that barely scratches the surface of everything that’s happening at Sunset High right before Christmas break.

James Budd #2: The Secret of Operation Brain By Dale Carlson

Brilliant scientist Shepherd smith seems to have gone berserk: he’s been blowing up missile bases all over Europe, bring the world to the brink of nuclear war…

As an epilogue to Whitman Season, I thought we’d revisit the James Budd series for the first time in a decade, a 4-volume series of paperbacks published by Golden which, like Whitman, is a subsidiary of  Western Publishing.

Background: The only reason why I even know about this short-lived series is because in the mid-1980s it was advertised in the back of Golden’s Trixie Belden paperbacks (presumably because both series involve a sidekick named Honey):

Meet cool, dashing, athletic James Budd, sixteen-year-old supersleuth with a taste for adventure. In his specially equipped red Firebird, with his beautiful friend and partner Honey Mack at his side, James is ready to handle intrigue, crime and trouble wherever he finds them. And find them he does…

Written by the prolific Dale Carlson, (a commenter kindly directed me to her The Plant People back in 2016), the series has good, sci-fi-ish titles, although it is really closer to the Christopher Cool Jr-CIA series in content.

The Plot: This volume opens with teenage ladies’ man (ladies’ boy?) James meeting a distraught teenage girl at the airport in his hometown of King’s Rock, Nebraska: Samantha Smith (“The owner of the blue eyes also owned a head of red curling hair, and a full, absolutely perfect figure…”) has been sent to King’s Rock by James’s adoptive father, private eye Sam Star for her own safety, after her own nuclear physicist-father mysteriously disappeared.

Nurses Three: Tracy’s Little People (#6) By Jean Kirby

And how could she defend herself against an accusation so terrible that it could end her career as a nurse, even send her to prison?

Continuing our annual fall retrospective of Whitman girls’ series books with the 6th volume in the series by Jean Kirby, AKA Jinny McDonnell AKA Virginia Bleecher McDonnell.

Background: I’ve noted before the reasons for the enduring popularity of Nursing as profession for YA heroines, so it’s no surprise that in the mid-1960s Whitman would take a pass at the genre. To their credit, they came up with a rather ingenious marketing concept: three young-adult daughters of a world-famous widower-surgeon, who each answer the calling. The Scott sisters- nursing student Coleen (called Kelly), private-duty nurse Penny, and pediatric nurse Tracy, each star in their own adventures, which Whitman has conveniently color-coded for us in (respectively) turquoise, yellow, and pink covers.

(As I have ALSO noted, you might be better served by picking a sister and reading her adventures one after another, rather than trying to get your mind around how the series skips around in time if you proceed in order of publication)

The Plot: I would say that up to this point, eldest sister Tracy has been my least favorite of the Scott siblings, notable for her towering blonde beehive hairdo and cultural insensitivity toward her Bureau of Indian Affairs patients. Her previous volume also lacked the nursing school DRAMA of Kelly’s books or the bizarre adventures of Penny’s books… but this time Kirby/McDonnell gives us a storyline almost totally away from the hospital setting and a last-minute plot twist so insane that I ended up kind of loving it.

Wrapping Up The Imaginary Summer Book Club: Psycho By Robert Bloch

(Click here for information on the 2023 edition of Molly’s Imaginary Summer Book Club Featuring Classics of Women’s Literature. This week, the final selection, Psycho By Robert Bloch.)

Like Peter Benchley’s Jaws (2014 Imaginary Summer Book Club selection!), Psycho is a book that has become all but forgotten in the shadow of the superior film adaptation; and like Jaws, it is a lot of fun to revisit the pulpy charms of the source material.

There is not much for me to add to the body of scholarship about Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, which the director (a legend at this point in his career) shot on a comparatively tiny budget, inventing the modern slasher film by using the crew from his television show, and audaciously casting one of Hollywood top leading ladies (only to kill her off 45 minutes into the film) and an up-and-coming matinee idol as the deranged murderer.

Robin Kane (#5) Mystery In The Clouds By Eileen Hill

“Who’s going to shoot at a girl? Don’t be so scaredy. Come on!”

Mindy sighed. “I might as well. If you get shot, I’ll just get shot, too.”

Background: Usually, fall means a look at the “girls’ series” published by Whitman in the 1940s through the 1970s- those thick, cellophane-clad hardcovers featuring teen girls sleuthing around Westchester County or California’s Bay Area.

Constant readers, after more than 10 years of this, we’re really scraping the bottom of the Whitman barrel around here, having run through all of the Ginnies, Donnas, Kims and (ugh) Pollies that Whitman unleashed on the world. Who does that leave us with… well, California’s favorite teen sleuth/perpetrator of ethnic stereotypes, Robin Kane.

With this volume Whitman brought Robin back after a four-year absence… but why? In her most thinly-plotted adventure yet there is barely a mystery to solve.

The Plot: It actually starts out promisingly enough, as the strongest element in this series is the California Casual setting. Robin’s parents are arty types (Dad is a syndicated cartoonist, Mom carves gnomes out of driftwood) and her BFF Mindy’s widowed father is a big-time movie producer. 13-year-old Robin and Mindy plan on being “secret agents” when they grow up, and practice by embroiling themselves in all sorts of mysteries involving swarthy Latin stereotypes. As the book opens, Robin and Mindy and their brothers/crush-objects are preparing to enter their town’s float in the Rose Bowl parade, a good California-based project.

Unfortunately, we will immediately abandon the only conceit that makes this series readable and instead follow Robin and Mindy on an increasingly circuitous journey in pursuit of a gang of international… stamp thieves.