Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Zindel, Paul (Vol. 26) - Judith N. Mitchell

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JUDITH N. MITCHELL

[In The Girl Who Wanted a Boy] Sibella Cametta, 15 year old clod and scientific whiz, learns that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. Zindel's adolescent novels are not everyone's cup of tea, but I love them. This one, too, is a fun house ride where one careens from heartache to hilarity without time to adjust to the author's antic zaniness. Sibella's mother and sister are faintly likeable horrors, the object of her affections is a poor girl's [Marlon] Brando, and Sibella herself has a juggernaut methodology that invests her quest for a boy friend with genuine black comedy. Perhaps it's this term black comedy, hastily borrowed from stage parlance, that is the key to Zindel's adolescent novels: he is to the teen novel what [Edward] Albee is to drama. It's a mistake to chide him for fantastic plot shifts, or a gallery of grotesqueries masquerading as normal people. His exaggerations pin point the absurdities of...

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1. Introduction
2. Diane Farrell
3. Zena Sutherland
4. The Times Literary Supplement
5. Marilyn R. Singer
6. John Rowe Townsend
7. Diane Gersoni-Edelman
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. Mary Silva Cosgrave
10. Zena Sutherland
11. BEVERLY A. HALEY and KENNETH L. DONELSON
12. Isabel Quigly
13. Zena Sutherland
14. Isabel Quigly
15. Stanley Hoffman
16. Joyce Milton
17. Maxine Fisher
18. Jack Forman
19. Cyrisse Jaffee
20. Sally Holmes Holtze
21. Peter Fanning
22. David Rees
23. Paxton Davis
24. Judith N. Mitchell
25. Margery Fisher
26. A. Thatcher
27. Copyright

1. Paul Zindel