Museums, uh-oh

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Museums: always a dangerous sign.

Sister of the Bride is my favorite novel in Beverly Cleary’s “First Love” series. The Luckiest Girl is in second place, followed by Fifteen and Jean and Johnny . I find that I can best enjoy these books by not thinking at all about my experience of high school. Wait, what’s a “high school”? Did I even attend one? I make no comparisons.

Sister of the Bride has many wonderful moments of gentle social satire. It’s in many ways a mid-century Bay Area version of Jane Austen. But: Rosemary MacLane and Greg Aldredge, students at UC Berkeley, are, as the novel makes clear, at least a tad counter-cultural. One more school year and they can participate in the Free Speech Movement as a nice, young married couple.

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)