It's about the daughter of a zany, unconventional single mother who eventually remarries without losing her zany, unconventional ways. Well, as many of you know, I was all excited to find this old favorite of mine in the Friends of the Library book sale last month. This should go, but I'll probably keep it. That was my speech for Prose and Poetry my sophomore year. Most of her books included controversial topics, and she also wrote Sunshine, about a young mother dying of cancer. I didn't realize that Norma Klein died back in 1989, at the age of 51. I really should pull this one, but the description of Brett and her mother at a peace march in Washington wearing dresses "so people don't think only hippies protest", puts this so squarely in the realm of historical fiction that I may keep it. Now, when it is more common, there are not as many. So many scandalous things, and thirty years later all we can think is "The mother let the girl eat RAW HAMBURGER?" It seems somewhat odd to me that in the 1970s, when relatively fewer parents were divorced and dating, that there were so many books about children dealing with those issues. I loved her novels Sunshine and Breaking Up as a tween and I want to read more of her whenever I next feel the urge for a feel-good scandal of yesteryear.īrett's mother has never been married, has a career as a photographer, wears jeans a lot, has a boyfriend who brings movies over for Brett to watch, gets another boyfriend who occasionally spends the night, and fixes steak tartar for dinner. Norma Klein is every bit as PG-13 as Judy Blume, but a lot more forgotten. I would've preferred a non-connubial set-up with lots of macrame and sacred crystals instead. I will say (SPOILER ALERT) that it bummed me out when the mother sold out and married the Wolf Man in the end. Klein is able to really get into the preteen spirit Brett's thoughts and observations of the "grown-up world" seem absolutely spot on. This book is a fine exploration of marriage in the seventies and it's all the more interesting from a preteen's vantage point. I even imagined the Grandfather as a smarter Ted Baxter! I imagined Brett's mother as a raunchier Rhoda, the misguided mantrap of a neighbor as Phyllis, Brett as Bess, etc. A pleasurable aspect of this book was that I kept imagining characters from the Mary Tyler Moore show while reading, probably because it was written in 1972 and takes place in various shag-rugged apartments. He has a wolfhound, a pock-marked face and a great red beard.
This book tells the story of Brett, an eleven-year-old girl with a feisty unwed-and-single-by-choice mother who's brought her up on all varieties of granola liberal hogwash.
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