Skurnick is a blogger for Jezebel.com and has a literary blog called Old Hag. This bodes well for me enjoying her work. Shelf Discovery is essentially a curated collection of "book reports" about all the books we all read way too many times.Personal favorites include every book Madeline L'Engle ever wrote for teens and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
The style of the book is very bloggy - conversational, shortish chapters, inside jokes. Skurnick also manages to refocus my old favorites through a generous feminist lens. Most fun, she shows how silly parents, teachers and general alarmists are when they worry about the influence of television and Lindsay Lohan. There's more hormone-filled sex-ed in your average Judy Blume novel than I got in 12 years of public schooling!
This book is sort of a nostalgic love-letter to my early teen years and I nostalgically loved every page of it. I highly recommend this if you spent age 11 with your nose buried in a book.
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