We soon learn that New Boy’s name is Stan Crandall when he calls to ask her out. And her curly brown hair, which had seemed pretty enough in the mirror at home, now seemed childish compared to Marcy’s sleek blond hair, bleached to golden streaks by the sun. Her skin wasn’t tan enough and even if it were, she didn’t have a white pique dress to show it off. Her yellow cotton dress was too–well, too little girlish with its round collar and full skirt. Jane and a New Boy meet cute while she’s babysitting a terror of a little girl, and Fifteen, all 125 pages of it, goes back and forth over the age-old question: Does he like me? Jane thinks of herself as plain and boring, especially compared to popular Marcy:

The attraction of this book for me, and I suspect for others, is that of an every-girl entering into her first romance. (Fans of Mad Men might remember in “ The Gypsy and the Hobo” how a dog-food company’s brand suffers when the public learns the main ingredient in the early, mid-60’s.) Not only was it a time and place in which cajoling your parents into letting a boy take you to a movie was a conflict, but one before dog-food companies stopped advertising their true ingredients. I merely want to go to the movies with him.” You guessed that, right? The book was published in 1956, and is still in print, so I have to think it’s got something timeless going for it, since modern teens reportedly are obsessed with new things, not relics, and much of it is absolutely of its time: Our heroine, Jane Purdy is fifteen years old.

So I’d be curious if any of you out there read Fifteen for the first time, and what you thought, since my reaction is obviously colored by having a history with it.) (Is my tolerance of its sweetness a result of my nostalgia/early imprinting? One of the things I’ve noticed on this readalong is that some books, e.g., A Wrinkle in Time, aren’t as fiercely beloved by adults who read them for the first time. IT’S SO CHARMING! And yet, not in a saccharine way, at least to me. Re-reading Fifteen, it’s easy to see why I liked it. I re-read it as part of the Summer of Shelf Discovery Readalong for Chapter 8, which is about romance. Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen was a particular favorite of mine when I was young.

Fifteen book by beverly cleary