This is a volume of 12 short stories written for and about teens in the 1950s, stories "from Scholastic Magazines brought together for the first time in book form for the Teen Age Book Club." The copy I'm glancing through as I write this has been our family copy, and I can't remember ever NOT seeing it on first the family shelves and now mine, the lucky caretaker of it. All four girls loved the stories in this, and we read it so often it doesn't have its cover any longer, but I sure remember the image in the cover provided! All the stories are clever and fun--and "wholesome," as you might imagine. Authors are Max Steele, Mary Dirlam, Marjorie Holmes, Jerome Brondfield, Peter Brackett, Frederick Laing, B.J. Chute, Rosemary Howland, A.J. Ciulla, and Betty Kjelgaard.

My personal favorite, The Date Catcher, by Frederick Laing, is about a girl who is terribly shy and feels unattractive--a nobody who no one has asked to the benefit dance on Sunday. For "Who was going to ask bashful Genevieve Smith?" As she thinks this, she's walking down the isle of a department store and sees a display of "Date Catchers," eye-catching barrettes of all sorts..."every color of the rainbow, it said--pick a color to suit your personality." A clerk convinces her to wear a bright green barrette which Gen thinks she could never wear, but it goes so well with her copper hair, the clerk tells her.

But as she's leaving the store with her hair pulled back by the barrette, a funny old man stares at her (which seems like a sort of conquest, anyway) but then starts following her! He calls out after her, and she races to the teen hangout, where BERT HOWLAND hangs out. He starts talking to her for the first time, and, because she's wearing the date catcher, her rejoinders are as snappy and flirty as his. Well, he asks her to that dance.

She hurries back to the department store to get the blue and gold date catcher that will match her dress, but it isn't there! She panics since she can't catch Bert's attention again without it. The same clerk tells her she's got the barrette saved for her...but it's just like same one she'd already bought--in fact, it IS the same one she'd bought. It had fallen out of her hair, and the old man had tried to catch her to give it to her, but when he couldn't he left it with the clerk. The story ends with Genevieve smiling and smiling--to herself. ( )