There is, I am sure, much good sense and sound advice for adolescents in The Girl who wanted a Boy. The trouble is that to find these desirable qualities you have to hack your way through a jungle of slang, hyperbole and clotted verbiage so dense that I do not believe even American readers will find the exercise an easy one. This is not so much a story as a situation, the outline of an encounter between a schoolgirl of fifteen and a lad of nineteen who conveniently blames his casual nature on nagging parents. For that matter, one of Sibella's parents nags too, and the somewhat different tone has much the same effect. To her assertion that 'boys don't want to caress an electro magnet' her capable fixer of a daughter replies 'Look, Mom, I think there's a big difference between being an electro magnet and lassoing every used-car salesman who comes along'. But in the end, however strong the girl's reaction against her mother's boy-friends, Sibella has to recognise that they offer her mother a companionship that goes beyond the physical, and her pursuit of handsome Dan Douglas, with her tool-bag and accumulated savings, inept and painful as it is, brings the first lesson she has to learn about the definition of love…. I only wish the author had been a little less explosive and obscure in putting over his message. (p. 3971)
Margery Fisher, "Close Encounters," in her Growing Point, Vol. 20, No. 4, November, 1981, pp. 3967-71.∗
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