The 80s were always a bad idea

Read a post today by MBC (a lovely and witty fellow librarian spinster whose blog I recommend) that jogged a special, even sacred memory which I must now share. A couple of weeks ago I weeded through some of the YA collection, looking for ripped up, outdated, low-circulating items. What I found were stacks of books with cover designs from the 1980s, complete with the worst of the day's fashions. MBC describes how difficult it is to convince teenagers to take a book seriously when the cover model is wearing pegged pants. And oh, what truth she speaks.

The biggest treasure in the collection for me, though, was an entire shelf of books with titles like Too Young to Die. They all have really soft, misty photography on the cover, with pensive models wearing pastel-colored sweaters. I remember reading books just like these in the late 80s and early 90s. I owned one in which a girl starts volunteering as a candy striper and not only loses weight because she works so hard that she forgets to eat, but she also meets a teen cancer patient named Matt and he becomes her boyfriend. Until he dies. Now I have to wonder what exactly was going on with us as young girls that made terminal cancer and the teens who have it such a riveting literature form?

Posted in: book lust