I haven't thought about Mary Downing Hahn in years, but earlier this week when I was racking my brain for scary books I've known and loved, I suddenly remembered Wait Til Helen Comes and I was just absolutely flooded with nostalgia for one of my favorite YA authors of all time. Not only is she a former librarian (holla!), she was also writing YA back when it wasn't really a thing, at least not a lucrative, blockbuster movie-spawning franchise thing. Along with Judy Blume and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, she was just writing really excellent, stand-alone novels for teens.
I've already recommended Wait Til Helen Comes as a great Halloween book, but it isn't exactly representative of her body of work, most of which is strikingly ordinary. YA fiction today is very elaborate and fantastical, and there was certainly plenty of YA fantasy stuff when I was younger (Madeline L'Engle, for example), but today it seems like even the relatively down-to-earth YA fiction has so many elements of teen fantasy and projection. These novels end up reading like very well-constructed daydreams as a result, even stuff like Eleanor and Park. Mary Downing Hahn does not write that way, and her novels don't feature any elements of fantasy; her characters are never girls you wish you could be, who live lives you can only daydream about. The are extremely real and fully-formed, and most of the time their lives are difficult (but never too difficult) in really ordinary ways. I think what appealed to me about them was the way they function as YA fiction that behaves like adult fiction-- you get the sense that Mary Downing Hahn respects her readers and therefore doesn't feel the need to coddle or condescend. I'm really anxious to go back and re-read some of them now to see if they hold up as strongly as I remember, but if I had a teen in my life I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
Stepping on the Cracks was possibly my favorite, and is a historical fiction novel about the WWII homefront and military propaganda (did I mention it's very sophisticated for YA?). I also loved Tallahassee Higgins (parental abandonment and identity), December Stillness (Vietnam War), and The Jellyfish Season (divorce and the struggle of having a slutty cousin). I plan on revisiting some of those but I'm also really curious about her newer books (she's published over twenty) and her newest YA novel came out in 2014, so I have a lot of catching up to do.
I have to apologize for the image quality but I couldn't write this post without including an original, 1970s illustrated library binding edition cover, because that is how I remember them.