In the following excerpt, Forman comments on the auto-biographical elements and depiction of women in Zindel's plays, often comparing the characterizations in his dramas to those in his young adult novels.

In the following excerpt, Raymond examines Zindel's life and literary career and highlights the autobiographical details in Amulets against the Dragon Forces.

Here, in the course of arguing that drama is a form of expression inherent in humankind, Zindel recollects events in his own life that demonstrate an innate affinity for the theater.

Approaching a new Paul Zindel novel is something of an adventure…. The reason is that, unless he changes radically as a writer of "young adult novels" (a phrase with which I've never been entirely comfortable), one is bound to be either wildly wild about Zindel's books or wildly disappointed. It is a simple matter, although somewhat coarse and irritatingly unsophisticated too: ask, say, a twelve-year-old what he thinks of a particular movie he's just seen and he wil...

Janeczko is an American educator and editor of works for young adults. Below, Zindel discusses with Janeczko his development as an author and offers advice to new writers.

[Paul Zindel] speaks to young people about man's cruelty and "matters of consequence" in three novels. [The Pigman, My Darling, My Hamburger, and I Never Loved Your Mind] …, and one drama, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds…. In these amusing, provocative, and very-much-of-our-time works, Zindel presents questions to his readers, and if they care (and they do), they will search for answers. Their own answers. (p. 941) He looks at the world through the ey...

Since 1977, Rich has been the chief cinema and television critic for Time magazine. He is also a contributor to Ms., the New York Times, and Esquire. In the following review of the 1989 Circle Repertory Company's production of Amulets against the Dragon Force, Rich comments on the anguish in the characters' lives and finds Zindel's plot and use of mythology overworked

[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 kin...

In the following review, Winer compares Zindel's depiction of Chris Boyd in Amulets Against the Dragon Forces to J. D. Salinger's portrait of Holden Coalfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

A Yugoslavian-born American film and drama critic, Simon has been both praised as a judicious reviewer and censured as a petty faultfinder. He believes that criticism should be subjective, and as Andrew Sinclair has observed: "He is as absolute and arrogant in his judgments as any dictator of culture, a rigidity that is his great strength and weakness. " In the following review, he points out the shortcomings of And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little but offers a generally positive assessment of th...

Clurman was a highly-regarded American director, educator, author, and drama critic for The Nation from 1953 to 1980. His writings include the acclaimed book of reminiscences All People Are Famous (Instead of an Autobiography) (1974). In the review below, he praises the performance of the cast and remarks on the caustic comedy of And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, concluding that the play "is chiefly a display of bad manners and excruciating rudeness. "

An English-born American drama and dance critic whose commentary has appeared regularly in New York Times and New York Post, Barnes has been called "the first, second and third most powerful critic in New York " In the following review, he encourages theater-goers to attend the 1970 off-Broadway production of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Addressing the analogy between the marigolds and the depicted family, Barnes observes: "We are all the product of our enviro...

Here, Simon approves of the production of Amulets against the Dragon Forces, praising Zindel's use of dialogue.

Here, Barnes discusses the various themes in Amulets Against the Dragon Forces.

Like the other heroes of Paul Zindel's books [Chris Boyd, hero of Confessions of a Teenage Baboon], can explain, in language that comes convincingly from a sixteen-year-old, what the bizarre circumstances of his life have brought him to. His mother is a kleptomaniac nurse who takes him round to her patients' houses when she's hired. In between jobs they live out of two suitcases and three shopping bags in a rundown rooming house called the Ritz Hotel. So, no home, no stability, and ...

Death is not an easy subject to deal with in children's books. Attempts to reassure young people too often create saccharine prose; attempts to confront the issue can result in a grim and unappealing tone. Alas, "A Star for the Latecomer"—the story of a young girl trying to come to terms with her mother's approaching death from cancer—tries to find a middle ground but fails. Like Roni Schotter's "A Matter of Time." concerning a similar situation...

Paul Zindel's people seem to take over his book entirely and live so vividly you forget there's a narrator at all. [J. D.] Salinger managed the same effect in The Catcher in the Rye with an adolescent narrator who seemed to pickle a generation forever in his chat (which some found insufferably coy). Nobody thought his book suitable for Holden Caulfield's contemporaries in those days, or put it on the children's shelf. Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball! is a lot more...

[In his My Darling, My Hamburger], Zindel copped out on his likable, interest-sustaining characters by resolving their problems in a pat, moralizing manner. The moralizing in I Never Loved Your Mind is just as obtrusive—and the characters are more superficial (particularly the female protagonist, who's a caricature embodying the worst traits of the clichéd hippy). In a relentlessly flip, trying-to-be-funny, first-person narrative punctuated by unclever footnoted comments, Dewey, a super...

[Paul Zindel's] problem as a writer is what to do when you are writing about [the non-conforming young in America] as an outsider to their current revolutionary values and life-style. He solves it [in I Never Loved Your Mind] in an immensely clever way which leaves a mild trace of anxiety. Dewey Daniels … has career problems. For want of anything else, he gets a job as a hospital assistant on leaving high school. Telling a first person narrative, Mr. Zindel wins our identification with the hum...

[In The Girl Who Wanted a Boy] Sibella Cametta, 15 year old clod and scientific whiz, learns that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. Zindel's adolescent novels are not everyone's cup of tea, but I love them. This one, too, is a fun house ride where one careens from heartache to hilarity without time to adjust to the author's antic zaniness. Sibella's mother and sister are faintly likeable horrors, the object of her affections is a poor girl'...

[My Darling, My Hamburger is a] skillfully written story of four high school seniors … that has tremendous appeal on the entertainment level, but that totally cops out on the issues raised: sex, contraception, abortion. The action in the story happens to Liz and Sean; Maggie and Dennis, there to register and transmit what's happening emotionally, are sensitive, insecure alter egos for those glamorous, hip loners. The teenagers here are the most realistic of any in high-school novels to date: t...

Whatever one expects of a novel by Paul Zindel, [A Star for the Latecomer] is not it. (It is co-authored by his wife.) There are no drunk mothers, wayward fathers, and "off the wall" kids trying to find one another. There is not even the ambiguous mixture of cynicism and hope which has become the Zindel trademark. What there is is a sugar-coated though surprisingly moving family story and teen romance about a 16-year-old, Long Island girl named Brooke Hillary, who attends a Manhattan high scho...

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 parent...

[In Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball! two] members of a high school therapy group run by the school psychologist grope toward real friendship and understanding, in a story that is ebulliently zany, at times seeming exaggerated, at times very funny. Edna is withdrawn, resisting her mother's constant nagging about getting a date; "Marsh" Mellow is a borderline psychotic who tries to convince Edna to help him rescue his father, whose letters he produces…. Marsh and Ed...

Paul Zindel has been a trendsetter in young-adult fiction since 1968. Significantly, his latest book ["The Undertaker's Gone Bananas"] features a teen-age girl who's obsessed with death, a boy who's obsessed with practical jokes and an undertaker who's a homicidal maniac. Significantly, too, Mr. Zindel turns these elements into a zany farce…. The most striking feature of Mr. Zindel's story is the setting—a white elephant luxury-apartment complex...

[Let Me Hear You Whisper is a touching and trenchant two-act play. It] reads beautifully, with good dialogue and characterization, an original plot, and a theme that should appeal to young people. [Helen, a] cleaning woman who has just begun working for an experimental biology laboratory, learns that the dolphin in a laboratory tank has failed to learn to talk and is therefore to be killed. Helen is a gentle, ingenuous person who has chattered with pity and affection to the dolphin. And it talks to her when...

[The Girl Who Wanted a Boy, written] by an author who certainly understands American teenagers, is a brilliantly and sensitively written story of Sibella's search for her ideal of love. She rejects offers of help and advice from her mother and sister, and turns instead to a book called "How to Pick Up Boys." She "falls in love" with a newspaper photograph of a nineteen year old boy called Dan, and hunts him down. He is as unsure and unstable as she is, but Sibella is unabl...