[Happy Endings Are All Alike] is Scoppettone's second work to deal with homosexuality, and it is a far more positive and assertive treatment of the subject than her first. The earlier work, Trying Hard to Hear You, dealt with a furtive, guilt-ridden, male relationship that ended in tragedy. But this work, perhaps buoyed by the women's movement and a more vocal stance on the part of homosexuals in the culture, recognizes that young adult literature must, from time to time, acknowledge homosexua...

There is virtually no validation for the lesbian teenager, and not only is her right to self-respect opposed by adult institutions, but she is also subject to emotional and/or physical abuse from homophobic peers. Scoppettone deals with such problems, including the rape of one of the protagonists, with depth and sensitivity in Happy Endings…. Her book concerns the lesbian relationship (already in progress) between Jaret and Peggy, upper-middle-class high school seniors in a small eastem town. The cen...

Such Nice People covers a five-day period during which 17-year-old Tom, second child and first son of a family who collectively have every problem in vogue in YA literature, carries out instructions from SOLA, a phosphorescent ruler, to kill his family with the exception of older sister Kit who is to be Duchess in the new order…. Kit, a doctoral candidate in psychology, lives away from home but is due to arrive for the holidays. She is in therapy to work through the residue of various love affairs. S...

Trying Hard to Hear You is a fourth book to put on the shelves next to [Lynn Hall's Sticks and Stones, Isabelle Holland's Man Without a Face, and John Donovan's I'll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip]. These are all books touching on the subject of homosexuality. In some ways Trying Hard is similar. For example, the people involved in the homosexual relationship are both males, and again there is a tragedy (death) at the end of the book. But it's also different in that...

[In Such Nice People], Scoppettone wants you to meet the Nash family of Logan, Pa.—a clean-cut, well-fed, all-American clan with seething craziness just beneath the surface. Cole, the father: over-protective of the kids, inhibited, zombie-like, pops Valium, is bitter about giving up a hot affair, dreams of escape. Mother Anne: daughter of an alcoholic, miserable, longing to consummate an affair with nice Jim. Older daughter Kit: normal, a little over-hungry for sex maybe. Younger daughter Sara: fat, ...

Long Time Between Kisses is a refreshing and well-written novel that explores the discovery and change inherent in adolescence. Billie James, the story's narrator and protagonist, lives in a loft in New York City's SoHo with her mother … and three cats. In the summer of her sixteenth year, she chops off her boring brown hair and dyes the remainder purple, hoping that this radical physical alteration will substitute for what she considers to be an unremarkable personality. In the course ...

[In "Trying Hard to Hear You"], Scoppettone has taken an inherently condescending form and pumped it full of "nature" content; the result is a little like reading "Double Date" in post-hippie costume and language (words like "masturbate" and "vomit" are bravely in place), with the obligatory moral punchline adjusted to 70's liberal pieties: not "save your virginity for marriage," but "as long as you don'...

The Late Great Me is the depressingly impressive story of Geri Peters, one of the half-million teenage alcoholics in this country. Although [Geri] is a fictional character, Ms. Scoppettone acknowledges that much of herself is to be found in her. This is the story of Geri's descent to the hell of alcoholism after she first tasted wine in her junior year of high school. At fifteen Geri considered herself a freak at Walt Whitman High because she was not a part of any group, "the Straights,"...

No doubt Camilla Crawford's "terrifically" trendy, affectedly blase monologue [in Trying Hard to Hear You] is intentionally slanted to reveal a certain cliquish pseudo-sophistication. Still, these Long Island teen-agers, whose lives revolve around a little theater production of Anything Goes, may turn readers off long before Cam's problems with her buddy Jeff and new boyfriend Phil coalesce around the discovery that the two boys are homosexual lovers. Despite the group's m...

[Trying Hard to Hear You focuses on the summer of '73, which for] narrator Camilla Crawford, a 16-year-old aspiring actress, revolves around the Youth On Stage production in which her Sandra Scoppettone 1936– © Nancy Cramptonwhole crowd participates…. During the course of rehearsals Cam falls for Phil Chrystie, who seems to reciprocate her feelings but puzzles her by his inordinate interest in her best friend Jeff...

Sixteen-year-old Billie James, heroine of Sandra Scoppettone's Long Time Between Kisses … has grown up in SoHo and Greenwich Village, and she dodges drug dealers and street crazies with aplomb. Harder to take lightly are her divorced parents: her mother, a failed artist turned carpenter …, and her father, a failed musician who freaks out on angel dust and has to be dragged away in a straitjacket. What can Billie do under the circumstances but cut her hair very short and dye it purple? T...

The Late Great Me could easily have been published as a "young adult problem novel" … since that's the audience which will primarily listen to the Late Great Me whose name is Geri. She's one of the post-pot teenagers who switched to juice, inadvertently really, after her first date, attractive Dave, introduced her to wine. Before that, alone with her only two friends … she'd been most unpopular with nothing to do except feed her resentment of [her] mother...

Dimensionless characters, a formless, melodramatic plot, and dialogue that substitutes repetitive jargon for human speech merge [in Happy Endings Are All Alike] to present an encapsulated version of the spectrum of society's attitudes and prejudices toward lesbianism and rape. Jaret's and Peggy's love affair flowers during the summer between high school graduation and college and flounders after Jaret's rape by a deranged boy—a most brutal scene—who has seen the gir...

[The Late Great Me] is centered on a problem rather than on empathetic characters. Geri Peters counts herself among the "freaks" in high school. Her mother keeps urging the girl to make friends with the popular crowd and is overjoyed when Geri announces she has a date. So is Geri, for her squire is handsome Dave Townsend, a new boy who passes up the girls in the "in" crowd. The girl's triumph, however, leads to disaster. For Dave introduces Geri to the world of booze. Befo...

[In A Long Time Between Kisses, the] author presents experiences facing many teen-agers in center city and creates situations that are both funny and sad, illustrating the problems of growing up and maturing during a short time span in the game of life. Attitude modification about the disabled is presented—personal and public attitudes about persons with multiple sclerosis. Sandra Scoppettone did her homework to be able to describe the various feelings and defense mechanisms of disabled individuals a...

As in Scoppettone's other books, excellent writing and lively characterizations grace a heartwarming "it could happen to me" story. [Long Time Between Kisses] tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who misinterprets the confused feelings, self-negation, and rebelliousness common to adolescence as love for a man with multiple sclerosis (who is himself confused and rebellious). And, as in the author's earlier writings, my only reservation about Long Time Between Kisses lies wit...

Happy Endings Are All Alike deals … with lesbian teen love and is a much stronger political and sexual statement [than Trying Hard to Hear You]. The story is told by one of the participants, not an observer, making explicit scenes of at least foreplay inevitable. The author has also worked in a steamy heterosexual rape scene, so that she can get in the fashionable clichés on that subject, too. It is to Scoppettone's credit as a writer that, in spite of all this propaganda overload, she ...

[In Long Time Between Kisses] Billie James must make some major changes in her life—or go [crazy]…. So—Billie cuts off her hair in a sort of butchered crew-cut, and dyes it purple to "express her self." It's been a long time between kisses for Billie, until Captain Natoli—old, senile, living on dog food, and ignored by family and friends, and Mitch, young, handsome, and suffering from MS, and running away from family and friends come into her life. To both sh...

Those who consider YA novels according to the handling and breakthrough value of their messages will give [Happy Endings Are All Alike] a high rating for depicting an unambiguous, freely accepted lesbian relationship, with a brutal rape to muster outrage, a moral battle bravely undertaken, and—except perhaps for the police chief—false stereotypes carefully avoided. (Both girls are pretty, had swell mothers, don't "hate men," etc.) What's more, none of it creaks; Sco...

[Such Nice People] could have come from page one of the sensational press, and it may be based in fact. But translating it to fiction (with a lurid masturbation-sodomy scene and graphic details of seven murders) seems indefensible unless cause and motivation are explored; and despite smatterings of psychological jargon, a mysterious "chemical break" is the only explanation. Scoppettone's readable enough style and canny handling of adolescent characters are not reasons enough to buy this...

Scoppettone's "Trying Hard to Hear You" … was a sensitive, well-written novel about young male homosexuals. ["Happy Endings Are All Alike"], though, seems based on ventriloquist's dummies, mouthing the author's unoriginal opinions about sexism, intolerance and what-not. It's a pity that Scoppettone doesn't do justice to a vital subject. A review of "Happy Endings Are All Alike," in Publishers Weekly (reprinted f...

[Trying Hard to Hear You] is one of this year's most affecting novels…. Without a trace of moralizing and never skirting the issue, Sandra Scoppettone has examined the underlying bitterness and prejudice even supposedly "hip" teenagers have toward homosexual activity. (pp. 51-2) Alice Bach, in her review of "Trying Hard to Hear You" (reprinted by permission of The Village Voice and the author; copyright © The Village Voice, Inc., 1974), in The Vi...

[Happy Endings Are All Alike is] a candid novel about a very controversial subject, lesbianism. The author handles the topic delicately, yet, frankly. She does not back down on moral values but faces the issue in such a manner that it could lead to an intelligent, unbiased discussion. A review of "Happy Endings Are All Alike," in Catholic Library World, Vol. 50, No. 3, October, 1978, p. 117.