Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Zindel, Paul (Vol. 26) - Margery Fisher

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MARGERY FISHER

There is, I am sure, much good sense and sound advice for adolescents in The Girl who wanted a Boy. The trouble is that to find these desirable qualities you have to hack your way through a jungle of slang, hyperbole and clotted verbiage so dense that I do not believe even American readers will find the exercise an easy one. This is not so much a story as a situation, the outline of an encounter between a schoolgirl of fifteen and a lad of nineteen who conveniently blames his casual nature on nagging parents. For that matter, one of Sibella's parents nags too, and the somewhat different tone has much the same effect. To her assertion that 'boys don't want to caress an electro magnet' her capable fixer of a daughter replies 'Look, Mom, I think there's a big difference between being an electro magnet and lassoing every used-car salesman who comes along'. But in the end, however strong the girl's reaction against her mother's boy-friends, Sibella...

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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