[Paul] Zindel is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; The New York Times has included four of his books in recent lists of outstanding children's books. It is especially distressing, in light of his enormous prestige, to discover that [The Undertaker's Gone Bananas] could not have been more outrageously sexist if that had been Zindel's explicit goal.
Bobby is a brash fifteen-year-old who has virtually no friends. He views himself as a kind of superboy and attributes his rejection by his peers as stemming from the fact that, "I happen to hold poetry, goodness, and beauty above all qualities." When faced with examples of injustice in the world, he responds automatically with physical violence. His only and recently found friend is Lauri. He describes his initial impression of her as "a timid delicate angora cat."… Two entire pages are devoted to listing all of the unlikely things which she fears will blot out her life at any moment. Bobby feels, "here is one girl who needed someone to look after her" and that "God or Nature had appointed him to assure her that life was really worth living." Bobby's strategy is to "psychologize" her out of her fears (rooted in a neighbor's death by fire) by planning adventures that will divert her mind. It is not in any way a relationship between equals.
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