Hahaha, this was hilarious, thank you! Ooh, yes please do Prom Dress next! I remember that one from when I was a teenager, about these girls all stealing this dress from each other because it looks so incredible on them a la Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, then awful things happen to them.
Okay, Prom Dress it is (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with a CURSED DRESS is pretty much the best thing I can imagine right now???), and then maybe back to Christopher Pike for Weekend!!
Thank you for reminding me of the MANY freeze-frame endings of 80's sitcoms, now am going to laugh hysterically and freeze with my face in a ghastly rictus JUST BECAUSE.
Aww, just the idea that Cal came to apologize - even though he never did it out loud and nobody (readers, anyway) heard or saw it - is enough to render him wholly harmless once again. Additionally, as all the fats must stick together it is written in the stars that he be with Dana, whatever trunk she's stuffed him into, AND SO MOTE IT BE. Honestly, it makes the most sense for Lara to continue to be consistently ridiculous and HINT at things she's solemnly sworn not to reveal. (LOLOLOL that Perry is So Wise that he understands "probably everything." Mr. Pike has no understanding of human females and clearly no memory of being an adolescent male, because comprehension = not high on the list of characteristics. At all.)
Sadly, I kind of feel like it's realistic for Perry to crush Lara; my friend Eddie fractured his skull and had to be airlifted from the lake at the camp where we worked, and what's the first thing I did to him when I saw him? I whacked him upside the head for saying something dumb like "Oh, hi." I kid you not. I was a very dumb seventeen-year-old, so relieved he was alive I did something wholly mortifying. Oy.
I also love Lara's naive belief that Dana's driving has improved by now and will make her bashed ribs feel just fine... um, this belief is not shared amongst readers, as Dana will now be doubly distracted.. "fixing her blouse." Yeah, I see you implying, Mr. Pike.
Someday Lara will be just as much as a dialog-less prop as her mother. I wish her joy of that day.
(PS, did you ever read SWEET VALLEY HIGH's "Murder in Paradise?!" I somehow had no idea there was a SVH murder mystery, and am cackling.
Thinking back on it, Richard Peck's "Are You in the House Alone" is the only horror I read as an Actual Teen (TM) and it was ...DREADFUL, cw for rape and violence, and yikes. That wasn't going after my lizard brain, my forebrain was pretty terrified of that one, too. I think the Goosebumps thing was as far as I got after that, and my students read those, and I rolled my eyes a lot, but meh, they were reading, who cares. I just can't seem to take horror seriously, and maybe that was the problem - maybe I should always have been reading them like this and laughing a lot.
I am here for the prom dress - it's like a really bad traveling pants/wedding dress match-up. It's supposed to bring every wearer luck on their special day, but instead it traps them within its airless polyester folds and EATS THEM, bwa-HAHAAHAHA. Yeah, I'm down.)
So many of the jaunty detective and buddy cop ones did those freeze-frames, too, like Magnum and CHiPs and the aforementioned Murder She Wrote! Such an odd choice for such an odd era, LOL.
Everything about the ending was just so... IN KEEPING with the rest of the characterization and choices in the book, sigh. And you are entirely right about it being realistic for him to squash her ribs—I absolutely have things like that from my child- and teenhood that I look back on and still cringe about, urgh.
I will TOTALLY look up Murder in Paradise, that sounds AMAZING, I had entirely forgotten that SVH mysteries existed and am immediately SO. EXCITED. to track them down.
I haven't read Are You in the House Alone since I was an Actual Teen—I read more of his middle grade than his YA (Blossom Culp!!!), I veered more Lois Duncan for YA—so I'll have to take a look back at all of that stuff, too.
I am VERY excited for Prom Dress, but I have to FORCE myself to not start—I know that Summer Reading is going to wreck me at work bc we're still down a person, so I'm largely running all the programming solo, and it's a bit of a scene at the moment. But maybe I can sneak something short in in the meantime........
Hahaha, this was hilarious, thank you! Ooh, yes please do Prom Dress next! I remember that one from when I was a teenager, about these girls all stealing this dress from each other because it looks so incredible on them a la Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, then awful things happen to them.
Okay, Prom Dress it is (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with a CURSED DRESS is pretty much the best thing I can imagine right now???), and then maybe back to Christopher Pike for Weekend!!
Thank you for reminding me of the MANY freeze-frame endings of 80's sitcoms, now am going to laugh hysterically and freeze with my face in a ghastly rictus JUST BECAUSE.
Aww, just the idea that Cal came to apologize - even though he never did it out loud and nobody (readers, anyway) heard or saw it - is enough to render him wholly harmless once again. Additionally, as all the fats must stick together it is written in the stars that he be with Dana, whatever trunk she's stuffed him into, AND SO MOTE IT BE. Honestly, it makes the most sense for Lara to continue to be consistently ridiculous and HINT at things she's solemnly sworn not to reveal. (LOLOLOL that Perry is So Wise that he understands "probably everything." Mr. Pike has no understanding of human females and clearly no memory of being an adolescent male, because comprehension = not high on the list of characteristics. At all.)
Sadly, I kind of feel like it's realistic for Perry to crush Lara; my friend Eddie fractured his skull and had to be airlifted from the lake at the camp where we worked, and what's the first thing I did to him when I saw him? I whacked him upside the head for saying something dumb like "Oh, hi." I kid you not. I was a very dumb seventeen-year-old, so relieved he was alive I did something wholly mortifying. Oy.
I also love Lara's naive belief that Dana's driving has improved by now and will make her bashed ribs feel just fine... um, this belief is not shared amongst readers, as Dana will now be doubly distracted.. "fixing her blouse." Yeah, I see you implying, Mr. Pike.
Someday Lara will be just as much as a dialog-less prop as her mother. I wish her joy of that day.
(PS, did you ever read SWEET VALLEY HIGH's "Murder in Paradise?!" I somehow had no idea there was a SVH murder mystery, and am cackling.
Thinking back on it, Richard Peck's "Are You in the House Alone" is the only horror I read as an Actual Teen (TM) and it was ...DREADFUL, cw for rape and violence, and yikes. That wasn't going after my lizard brain, my forebrain was pretty terrified of that one, too. I think the Goosebumps thing was as far as I got after that, and my students read those, and I rolled my eyes a lot, but meh, they were reading, who cares. I just can't seem to take horror seriously, and maybe that was the problem - maybe I should always have been reading them like this and laughing a lot.
I am here for the prom dress - it's like a really bad traveling pants/wedding dress match-up. It's supposed to bring every wearer luck on their special day, but instead it traps them within its airless polyester folds and EATS THEM, bwa-HAHAAHAHA. Yeah, I'm down.)
So many of the jaunty detective and buddy cop ones did those freeze-frames, too, like Magnum and CHiPs and the aforementioned Murder She Wrote! Such an odd choice for such an odd era, LOL.
Everything about the ending was just so... IN KEEPING with the rest of the characterization and choices in the book, sigh. And you are entirely right about it being realistic for him to squash her ribs—I absolutely have things like that from my child- and teenhood that I look back on and still cringe about, urgh.
I will TOTALLY look up Murder in Paradise, that sounds AMAZING, I had entirely forgotten that SVH mysteries existed and am immediately SO. EXCITED. to track them down.
I haven't read Are You in the House Alone since I was an Actual Teen—I read more of his middle grade than his YA (Blossom Culp!!!), I veered more Lois Duncan for YA—so I'll have to take a look back at all of that stuff, too.
I am VERY excited for Prom Dress, but I have to FORCE myself to not start—I know that Summer Reading is going to wreck me at work bc we're still down a person, so I'm largely running all the programming solo, and it's a bit of a scene at the moment. But maybe I can sneak something short in in the meantime........