 Ellen Emerson White |
Amy Lester is my soul sistah. Okay, since both Amy and a reader named Elissa wrote to me to express their undying love for her, now I will talk about Ellen Emerson White and some of her books, each of which I have read approximately 100 times.  Ellen Emerson White wrote a book called The President's Daughter back in, oh, I don't know, sometime in the mid-'80s. (And my copy looks absolutely NOTHING like the one in this link but has a very cute and stylish Meg sitting on the White House lawn in a yellow sweater of some kind.) Meg's family is from Boston, and her mom's a U.S. senator who decides to run for president on the Democratic ticket. And clearly, as the title reflects, I am giving nothing away when I tell you that she wins. And it's a big rootin' tootin' deal. A lot of the book covers the campaign and how bizarre and surreal it is for Meg and her siblings. And Meg has to move to D.C. and into the White House and adjust to this major life change where suddenly she has secret service agents and people like butlers asking her if she wants a Tab. Meg loves Hill Street Blues and Entertainment Tonight and puts Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" on all of her mix tapes. And she has two little brothers, Steven, who's about 11, I guess, and is an extreme smart aleck and plays baseball and is very Meg-esque even though they are sometimes mean to each other, and Neal, who is six and just cute like a six year old. And her parents are very normal parents even though her mom is president, and they are all engage in very witty and often sullen repartee, and there is this stylish black guy named Preston whom I believe is her dad's press secretary, and Meg and her best friend Beth are very sarcastic and funny together. And everyone gets in fights sometimes and they don't often say what's on their minds or in their hearts and they're all just really real. And Meg is very shy and smart and reads a lot and plays tennis and she has no idea if the boys just like her because she's the president's daughter. And overall, it is AWESOME.  There's a sequel called White House Autumn. (Again, my retro cover is about 100 times cuter than the ridiculous one in this link.) Meg and company are now getting more accustomed to live in Washington. She has a cute, bespectacled, piano playing, nerdy Jewish boyfriend named Josh and a new circle of friends whom she likes a lot. Things are all going along fairly normally until there is an assassination attempt on her mother's life. And it's all very scary and fucked up, because, after all, this is her MOTHER. And Meg gets pictured in Time or Newsweek or something sitting in the waiting room of the hospital with her head in her hands and she is like, excuse me, photographers, but fuck off! And there's lots of resentment even toward her mom for ever putting herself in the position of being a person who gets shot at, and Meg's life changes a lot because of security, and she gets very, very irate when the secret service takes her off the tennis team, and it's basically just about how the family copes with this heinosity.  The third book is called Long Live the Queen, and man, I am just getting more and more disturbed by these new covers with every link! I don't know, maybe they're actually old reject covers, because these outfits are certainly atrocious, but I don't know. Anyway, this is going to sound very stupid, but it's not! A la Zoe on The West Wing, Meg gets kidnapped. And somehow Ellen Emerson White manages to create a really suspenseful and interesting story, even though Meg spends a lot of the book alone, and somehow her fear, her great big giant balls, and just her overall humanity are just wonderfully conveyed. Even the kidnapper is multi-faceted and really sort of a fascinating character in his own right. Potentially lame, but so, so good. At one point Meg is in a cave (I know, I know) and she starts having all of these hallucinatory thoughts about The Sound of Music and Nurse Ratched and shit. And you would not believe the kinds of things she pulls in order to try and save herself. It's kind of hardcore at parts (like, hello, her teeth get knocked out because her fillings actually have security transmitters in them, unbeknownst to her), and creepy, but very good. The thing I love most about the White House trilogy is that the books have such potential to be dumb and over the top, but they are totally grounded in reality, and it's really through the characterization. Even though the events and situations and circumstances seem larger than life, you never feel like you're reading about people who aren't completely real, and flawed, and scared, and hilarious and wounded in their own ways. And they're about the first woman president to boot! THESE BOOKS ARE AWESOME. Okay, here my other favorites.  Romance Is a Wonderful Thing is apparently out of print, which is a damn shame, because it's probably the best book in the teen romance genre that I have ever read. Trish is another tennis player, very smart, blonde, pretty, popular, and kind of a prude, but not in a bad way. Her path crosses with that of Colin, a total goofball who's in the classes for bad students and gets in trouble because of his big mouth all the time. The thing is, Colin is really smart. And a brilliant reader who has read every book in the world, and he loves his cat, Ophelia, and he gets along great with his parents and performs things like Long Day's Journey into Night all by himself when he's alone in his room. And Trish really gets to like him, but everyone gives them a really hard time, because Colin is supposed to be a loser and a jerk, but he SO isn't. So Trish and Colin have to deal with their insecurities and also how they feel about each other and how they feel about worrying about what other people think of them, which is a really big thing to both of them and I think a main thing that draws them together. I'm not doing a great job explaining this one, but trust me, it's sweet and funny and touching and again, real characters, real teenagers, real parents, real teachers. REAL. That is what I love about Ellen Emerson White. (Come to think of it, perhaps I loved Colin and Trish so much because their relationship was so in the vein of Steve and Kayla, with whom I was obsessed around the same time that I first read this book in middle school. But to go into such a comparison would send me right over the edge of sanity, probably, so I will stop myself.)  Life Without Friends is about a girl named Beverly. Again with the Boston. Beverly reminds me a lot of Meg, except that she's what Meg would be like if her mother had been dead instead of president and her dad had been a standoffish Harvard professor instead of Meg's congenial First Gentleman dad and what Meg would have been like if she had been tangentially involved in the murders of two classmates because her boyfriend turned out to be a psycho. The psycho boyfriend murder thing takes place in a previous book that I didn't read until later (Friends For Life, which isn't nearly as good and Beverly is not a main character, but it's helpful for background), but Life Without Friends basically deals with Beverly's isolation and guilt in the aftermath of that incident and her fucked up relationship with her father, her young hippie stepmother, and mostly herself. She has an ulcer, she is so traumatized by what happened. She is forced into therapy, which she hates. Her therapist is kind of like the therapist on Once and Again in my mind. He and Meg chain smoke together while he tries to help her figure herself out. Beverly is pretty much the surliest person in history, and she doesn't know what in the fuck she's supposed to do with her life, and she basically slouches away from the world because a lot of people blame her for her involvement in the murders and she cannot fathom how it all turned out to be such shit. I cannot find this one for sale anywhere, and that makes me morose. Anyway, Beverly starts hanging out at the Public Gardens and she meets a groundskeeper there named Derek who somehow out-wiseasses her and is basically the complete opposite of her old psycho boyfriend even though they share physical similarities. (The book describes him as blond but I always pictured Derek with dark hair.) Beverly is massively apprehensive about making a new friend, much less finding a new boyfriend, but Derek is patient and gentle with her, and so kind. SO kind. He sings while perusing the opera section in the record store and carves little figures out of wood and wears a denim jacket and smokes Marlboros. And they forge this weird and unexpected and careful relationship, and through her time with Derek and therapy sessions and the patience of her stepmother and earning the gradual forgiveness and trust of her pole-up-butt father, she somehow starts to like life again. Very slowly, but surely. Motherfucking hell! Why isn't this book available anywhere? (There's a pretty good description of it here.) This is the kind of book that teens should be reading, for LORD'S SAKE. That's it. I am re-reading them all, starting tonight. Sometimes books don't stand up for me over time, and I go back and re-read them and am almost devastated by how much I loved them and how they no longer possess the greatness I once thought they did. But these books really do. Or at least I hope they will this time. And I have no idea what Ellen Emerson White is thinking, writing these biographies of Shaquille O'Neal when she could be writing more young adult fiction. When I was a pre-teen and a young teen, these books meant a lot to me, because the "heroines," if you will, were just normal girls. They were cranky and lonely and smart and confused and pissed off and some of them liked their families and had friends and some didn't and I just felt really bonded with them. If you can get your hands on them and you like YA fiction at all, I really recommend them.
© Copyright 2003 elb |
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