Sandra ScoppettoneRezensionen

Adventure

Lovely story - I didn't even know it existed until today. Lucky me for finding it!

I read this book back in High School and it always stayed with me. I finally bought a copy and re-read it, I was worried it wouldn't be as good as I remembered it but it was. This is definitely one of my favorite books.

"As long as people love instead of hate, what difference does it make who they love?"

A wonderful book that was the first hardcover I bought for myself. My original copy was loved to death over the years and now my brother gave me two copies!

I appreciated the relationship stuff going on in this book. It isn't your stereotypical beginning or ending of a relationship (although there were threads of both), but rather the hard part, the part that isn't always easy or pretty, but the day-to-day living of life in a relationship.

“And so what if happy endings didn't exist? Happy moments did.”

Sandra Scoppettone-Happy Endings Are All Alike

Does contain possible trigger regarding a very graphic rape scene.

This book has stayed with me since childhood and I recently had the chance to do a reread and found it every bit as compelling as I did back then..

reading this, one has to remember the book was way ahead of its time. Its about the love affair of two high school girls, Jaret and Peggy. They are close friends who fall in love.

It is, to the best of my recollection, one of the first books ever published in this genre. I loved it then and I love it now. But for new readers, you have to know that going in because attitudes back then were quite a bit different to say the least.

SPOILERS:

This book maybe triggering as it contains a vile nasty rape depiction. These girls keep their affair secret but are "outed" when a psychopathic boy who has been obsessed with Jaret, discovers her secret, rapes her and when charged, his defense is that the love affair between Jaret and Peggy "drove him" to it.

That would not fly today. It is rather surreal sometimes realizing how different the world is today and what it maybe like in say another few decades..or even over a hundred years from now when most of us wont even be here. In any event this is realistic young adult fiction at its best but should be read with caution. I give it 5 stars.

Still a great book. Did a reread a few years ago and it has held up well.

SPOILERS:

I think some YA books should be required reading in school and this maybe one of them. It is a pretty gloomy read but so well written. Geri comes off as so human.

I will be interested to read other reviews here..not as many as I had thought there would be.½

A decently written, slow burn Christmas story that juggles a lot of characters well, this book tells the heartwarming holiday story of someone who sets out to kill his family because an invisible entity named SOLA tells him to. SOLA also convinces him to stick a plunger up his butt at one point, so there's that too.

This book has been on my shelf forever. I don't know why I've never read it or any of her other ones. This introduces lesbian P.I. Lauren Laurano (Scoppettone has written many other series and non-series). Lauren is hired by a woman to find her sister's rapist. Before she can even get started the sister is murdered and then Lauren is abruptly fired. But, the case goes one and it turns out this family is in the dictionary as an example for the word dysfunctional. There was a lot to like about this book. The author's voice is really excellent. But, the main character, Lauren, really annoyed the heck out of me. I am definitely going to try another of Scoppettone's but might wait a while before I try another one in this series.

If this was meant to be a quirky mystery, it failed. The central character is simply weird. The premise of the mystery is pretty good but the implementation is not good. No more from this author.½

Description
New York City, 1943. Almost anything in pants has gone to serve Uncle Sam in the war–including Woody Mason, the head of a detective agency in midtown Manhattan. Left to run the show is his secretary, Faye Quick. She’s got moxie–which she’ll need when she stumbles over a dead girl in the street and takes on her first murder case. The victim, Claudette West, was a student at NYU and the daughter of a Park Avenue family. Claudette’s father is convinced greed was the motive, and that Claudette’s working-class boyfriend, Richard Cotten, killed the girl because she threw him off the gravy train. Faye, however, isn’t so sure, not when she learns about all the other men Claudette was secretly seeing–from her lecherous literature professor to an apparent con artist. For Faye, there are more shocking surprises in store than turns and dips in the Coney Island Cyclone.

This was a solid story about Faye as a very straightforward and no-nonsense PI and how she goes around checking on everyone and everything involved with the victim. The feel of the 1940s came through with popular jargon of the 40s used throughout along with mentions of the war, the music and other things popular at the time. I thought Faye was likable, believable and persistent in finding out what happened. I liked the book and would read more by this author.½

I first heard about this book in a summary of lesbian young adult fiction: its origins and how far it's come today. This book was mentioned as one of the books back from the days when characters were punished for being gay. And in this novel, particularly horrifically. So I thought maybe I should stay away from this book for a while. And I did.

Now, having read it, I can say the image I had of the book was completely false. It's not a punishment story; it's an exploration of the extreme homophobia and misogyny in society, especially in the 1970s when it was written, and it's also a refreshingly feminist and powerful critique. I was happily surprised to find such a strong message — which is hard to find in any book, but in a book written 35 years ago it was especially powerful.

Lauren Laurano, lesbian PI in New York City, gets obsessed by her cases. Lovely, shy Lake Huron refuses to talk about her rape, then is killed. As Lauren moves closer to the truth, her own life is endangered and she discovers a family's past can't always stay buried.

Greenwich Village PI Lauren Laurano appears for another bout with murder after someone shoots her good friend Megan. As she questions children, ex-husbands, and other suspects, Lauren acquires essential self-awareness as well as clues.

Difficile de le lâcher tant le style de Sandra Scoppettone me plait, me tient en haleine et me donne envie de tourner la page pour la suivante.
Par contre, le livre datant des années 1990, les évocations de la sexualité de son personnage principal sont dans la paraphrase pas toujours très bien choisie.

I loved 'Happy Endings Are All Alike' when I was a teenager, so now I am a grown-up who can buy things from Amazon I picked this up. It's a similar book - teenage page-turning angst, two boys in love in a drama club, the way the other kids are cruel to them because of this.

There are lots of things I probably wouldn't have picked up on reading it as a teenager - the irritating unselfaware voice of the first person teenage narrator, the really heavy handed foreshadowing that there will be Tragedy...

I guess the main thing that's strange about reading this book in the Future, where I have a nice relaxed liberal social circle and gay marriage is legal, is the strange tension in it. On one hand, it's selling a 'love is love and gay people are just normal people who should be allowed to love, and people who persecute them are arses' message. But on the other hand there is the huge trope of 'if people find out you are gay your friends will try to torture you and then you will Die Tragically' that is probably less helpful and supportive than we think it was, and has probably been overdone with hindsight, and this book is a prime example of it.

This is one of those books that I read more for the history than the story itself. I can only imagine how groundbreaking this novel was when it was first published in 1979; not only does it focus on the lesbian relationship between two teen girls (and, altogether, it's painted in a good light), but it also mentions the Women's Liberation movement, too. So, yeah, definitely a book that was probably given the stink eye quite frequently.

The book does have a tendency to come off as dated. The characters "rap" quite a bit, and it took me a second to figure out that they meant having a conversation instead of, well, trying to be the next Eminem. And "does a chicken have lips" - haha, I can remember my mom saying that ALL of the time when I was little.

The writing style is rather sparse, and the author has difficulty picking one narrator per chapter, which leads to a lot of switching between narrators at a dizzying pace. That is quickly becoming one of my pet peeves in fiction.

Shout out to the character who doesn't shave her legs; for some reason, that's still controversial to this day!½

Altro tuffo nell'infanzia, questo decisamente meno riuscito. La protagonista mi è risultata abbastanza irritante e i temi sono trattati come li trattano le serie americane dello stile Dawson Creek e simili.
Il tutto in generale dava quell'impressione di americanità, intendo cioè tutti i luoghi comuni sulla vita liceale di cui sono intrisi serie tv e film.

I haven't re-read this for many years and it seemed like time. A copy floated around the house when I was a child and I bought my own copy some decades later. I adore this faux children's book narrated by a beatnik child who lives on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village with her parents, Hugh (a poet) and Marcia (a sculptor). The text is funny and poignant by turns, with cultural references that I didn't understand as a child but appreciate now. The illustrations by Louise Fitzhugh are charming and dynamic. I've always loved the illustration on page 86 where High and Marcia are asleep on a bare mattress, curled up fetally with their backs to each other. If you remember the Village when it was, like, not square, you'll, like, dig Suzuki Beane.

Very enjoyable book. Sgt Donato and his daughter Lt Donato are assigned to work together on a serial murderer case who is killing nuns. They work on mending their relationship while going after a killer. Very suspensful ending.

Interesting murder of a young girl found dead and propped as a mannequin in a gallery window in Soho, NYC. The gallery is on the same street as P.I. Fortune Fanelli who is hired by a rich patron of the arts on a recommendation from Fort's friend, Father Pat. Fast page-turning plot with a very exciting ending.

Faced with the revelation that her best friend is a homosexual, a sixteen-year-old tries to cope with her own and her friends' reactions toward him.

I got A CREATIVE KIND OF KILLER in ebook form that was free.The plot of the book was very interesting, it's about a girl that was killed ,and Fortune Fanelli a former detective,and the main character had to figure out who had killed this girl,and why?For me there were entirely to many typos, and a few spelling errors in the story line.Like the number 1 in place of the the letter I.Also another thing Fortune who was a little bit unsure of him self at times( would use the word maybe) as though what he was thinking or saying wasn't factual. Also what got me was Fortune was being(to me) a little bit to descriptive about certain things.For example: the person who he meet or came into contact with, he would describe what they were wearing in which it took(I think) away from the main purpose of ther story.As I was read on in the book Fortune would every now ,and then reminisce on certain things,or place,and people as if we(the reader) would know who, what,and where he was talking about. It was an OK read.

It's WWII and the secretary has to take over the Detective Agency. Faye talks like Sam Spade and she gets the job done by asking lots of questions. She's hired to find the murderer of a wealthy society woman while uncovering a phoney Rockefeller that the victim was using to keep her parents in the dark. She solves the crime with the help of her secretary, her next door neighbor, a friend who's a cop while keeping her gun on the shelf in the closet.

Petite, attractive, hip, cholesterol-conscious, and gay, Lauren isn't your typical private detective. She shares a brownstone apartment with her psychologist lover, Kip, in New York's fashionable Greenwich Village, where they are surrounded by a circle of warm friends who keep them well insulated from the craziness of city life. But when Lauren's closest childhood friend, Megan Harbaugh, is murdered in her West Village jewelry store, the illusion of protection is instantly shattered.

Lauren is hired by one of Megan's former husbands to investigate the crime, which propels her on several searches at once. The first is personal. Not only must Lauren come to grips with her best friend's death, but she finds herself questioning just how well she really knew Megan, who, though straight herself, was the first person to accept Lauren's lesbianism. While the list of suspects grows and the danger mounts, Lauren also begins wondering how well she knows anyone as she uncovers one startling surprise after another about her friends - and herself.