Paula Danziger is one of the best-selling authors for young adults currently working in the United States, perhaps most widely known for The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. Her characters tend to be good-hearted 'outlaws' rebelling against rigid and confused...

Paula Danziger is a best-selling author of novels for teens and pre-teens who is known for her light and humorous take on the serious problems that beset adolescents, including the break-up of a family, issues of self-esteem and identity, dysfunctional...

[Paula Danziger is a writer like Judy Blume] who capitalizes on the sordid details of adolescence [and whose] "Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?"… is ruefully and relentlessly funny, in a style reminiscent of Erma Bombeck's. Danziger's heroine is fourteen, and, it says on the jacket, "her life is the pits."… In the end, the heroine feels a lot better because, in a moment of revelation, she accepts her dreary future. "My life's not...

["Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?"] takes place in the airless chamber of early adolescence. The heavy problems of Lauren and Linda and Bonnie are: 1) Does it hurt to get your ears pierced? 2) Should ninth-grade girls go out with eighth-grade boys? 3) Should fifth-grade girls wear training bras?

Ninth-grader Lauren [in Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?] has a stereotypically impossible father (he rails against his wife going to work part-time; he disowns his college-age daughter for moving in with her boyfriend) and, like other Danziger heroines, she has "typical" concerns which are projected wholly from her shallow perspective…. Her ten-year-old sister Linda is dying for a training bra, so Lauren, remembering how important it was, gives her her old one—in a scen...