[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...

["The Pistachio Prescription"] is a novel no thoughtful 9- to 13-year-old should let parents see. They may not survive the instant ego deflation of viewing themselves through adolescent eyes…. On the other hand, Cassie's peers will surely identify with the ugly duckling heroine's inferiority complex, her hypochondria, her first love and her unexpected nomination for president of "the freshperson class" (my favorite phrase in the entire book). The work is real...

[In Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?, Lauren's parents] give her trouble, particularly her father, who is domineering; she's also troubled by her parents' fighting. Such general problems are the background for a wry and humorous story of Lauren's coping with the conformity her classmates and friends expect…. While Lauren is confronting the generation gap, establishing independence, giving adherence to standards of social behavior, and other universal problems of t...

Thirteen-year-old Cassie starts her first-person story [The Pistachio Prescription] with the assertion that "Pistachio nuts, the red ones, cure any problem," and she ends with "Twinkies, I bet, are the answer"—a fair enough indication of the level of growth that has transpired in between. And though Cassie does indeed have problems that neither pistachios nor twinkies can solve—chiefly, divorcing parents whose insensitivity brings on her frequent asthma attacks ...

Lively, believable and thoroughly readable, [The Pistachio Prescription] will have the same wide appeal as the author's previous book, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. Cassie is beset with some typical teenage insecurities…. Cassie, who believes her only salvation lies in compulsive pistachio eating, is an energetic and likable heroine. Readers will identify with her troubles at home and at school, and enjoy the skillful rendering of Cassie's growth and maturing. Despite an occasionally superfic...

The quotation from [Albert] Camus that precedes [The Pistachio Prescription] tells all: "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."… Cassie begins to understand that the situation [between her parents] is irrevocable [and] that she can live through the years before she is able to leave home…. Not unusual in theme, this is unusually well done; the characterization and dialogue are strong, the relationships depicted with perception, and th...