There were some really strange YA novels in circulation back in the 1980s but the one this reminded me of was the ones by Robert Cormier -- The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway. Did you ever read those? They are ODD. The Chocolate War was one of those books that got censored over and over and over, which is bizarre given that the main takeaway I remember was something like "Peer Pressure: sometimes bad," which is a deeply uncontroversial moral? (OK, there was a scene where a kid walked in on another kid in the boy's bathroom, discovered him masturbating, and pretending to take his picture since by chance he was carrying a camera at the time. The camera didn't have film in it, but the victim didn't know this. That was probably the source of the attempts to ban it. Neither boy in that side story was the protagonist.)
I also remember a book called "Lisa Bright and Dark" in which a teenage girl's friends attempt to fix her bipolar disorder with amateur group therapy? I was fascinated by the YA novels about mental illness but the ones in circulation in the mid-1980s were NOT GREAT, I have to say.
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Date: 2019-05-01 10:05 pm (UTC)I also remember a book called "Lisa Bright and Dark" in which a teenage girl's friends attempt to fix her bipolar disorder with amateur group therapy? I was fascinated by the YA novels about mental illness but the ones in circulation in the mid-1980s were NOT GREAT, I have to say.