They’re all nervous about going so far from home. girl who is street-smart (this is 1980s code for “black”) whose policeman father was killed in a robbery. (Can’t say I disagree with them there.) Faith is our Washington, D.C. Shelley is our aforementioned Iowa girl whose entire life is her small-town boyfriend and her high school’s football games, and her parents think her horizons could use a little broadening. (Can I just say that I thought it was fate that in my freshman year of college, out of all the rooms in an 18-floor dorm, I was randomly assigned to Room 407?) Dana is our aforementioned New Yorker whose parents are recently divorced. So, plot recap: Three very different girls are starting as sophomore transfer students at Canby Hall, a girls’ boarding high school in Massachusetts, and are assigned as roommates to Room 407. Does this sort of thing still go on with young adult books today? I’m dating myself. Martin for the first thirty or so, or the Sweet Valley High books, which were at least created by Francine Pascal, Emily Chase of Canby Hall fame doesn’t actually exist. Unlike the Baby-Sitters Club books, which really were written by Ann M. They never stop mentioning that Shelley’s a plump country girl, and at the same time she will never be shown on a cover that way.Īs was the case for many teen series in this time period, the Canby Hall books were written by a series of ghostwriters, so that a new book could be popped out every month and the publishers could take bubble baths in piles of money. This pet peeve of mine will be a recurring theme, by the way. These 1980s YA cover illustrators either only knew how to draw one kind of person, or they thought portraying an image of a normal figure would send young readers screaming into the night. And our supposedly overweight friend Shelley is … the one on the right? Unless my eyes deceive me - and they do not - she looks to have exactly the same build as the other girls. I’m pretty sure I just saw a picture of Gisele Bundchen in the exact same thing. Which of these three girls is the super-sophisticated fashionable Manhattanite (because that’s the only kind of Manhattanite there is, of course)? And which is the Midwestern, corn-fed, chubby hick? Ding ding ding! Dana, our stylish New Yorker I’m-a-fashion-buyer’s-daughter-as-will-be-repeated-ad-nauseam-over-the-course-of-this-series, is the … middle one? Yes, because a ruffled blouse buttoned to the neck with some sort of unraveling bow tie is super-hot.
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