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 (August 18, 1944 – July 8, 2004) was a U.S. children's author. She lived in New York City. Danziger, who said she knew in the second grade that she wanted to be a writer, wrote more than 30 books, including her 1974 debut The Cat Ate My...
When Paula Danziger blazed into the world of children's books thirty years ago with The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, it was immediately clear that a major talent had arrived. Soon it became equally clear that a major personality had entered the field--a flamboyant, funny,...
I was one of the scores of Paula's best friends. No one had a gift for making best friends and writing about deep friendship than Paula Danziger. We both started publishing in the 1970s. I, like so many in our children's book world, loved...
[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...
