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I am a little more excited than is strictly meet to announce I AM A SEPTEMBER PICK OF NANCY PEARL!

Here’s the whole review:

Lizzie Skurnick has a much-read blog called Old Hag, but Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading is actually based on her column Fine Lines from Jezebel.com. And reading Shelf Discovery is akin to spending time with an old friend talking about best beloved books from the past. Skurnick, with occasional contributions by Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman, Cecily con Ziegesar, Jennifer Weiner, Margo Rabb, Tayari Jones, and Anna Holmes, briefly describes and discusses many of the books that were hugely popular with girl readers from the 1960s through the 80s. It’s like a trip down memory lane. Here are Skurnick’s reactions to Are You There, God?, It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s classic tale of adolescence; John D. Fitzgerald’s hilarious The Great Brain, the story of a Catholic family growing up in Mormon Utah in the early 20th century; Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson’s 1980 weepy that can still bring me to tears when I try to talk about it; Homecoming, surely the best book Cynthia Voigt wrote in a career of writing outstanding teen novels; Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the essay written about it by Laura Lippman is not to be missed); Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan–which is still intensely scary after all these years. I could go on for pages (or just copy the index) listing all the books it was such a delight to find included. (A few more are Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, a thoughtful discussion by Tayari Jones of Judy Blume’s Forever, and more and more and more. The fun of a book like this is not only rediscovering old favorites (I hadn’t thought of the Zindel title in decades), but also recalling all the books that you wish had been included. For me, being probably a decade older than Skurnick, it was some of the older titles from the 1950s–the books by Rosamund du Jardin, Betty Cavanna, Lenora Mattingly Weber, and Mary Stolz, for example. But Lizzie (I feel by the time I get to page 345 of her book that we’re old and dear friends and I can therefore call her by her first name in this review) can still surprise me with her choices: She happens to include MY VERY FAVORITE Louisa May Alcott novel–An Old-Fashioned Girl, surely one of the best books you may not have read because you were too busy crying over Jo marrying Mr. Baer instead of Laurie in Little Women. Reading Shelf Discovery is like opening a space capsule: these were the books that made us what we are, and aren’t we lucky we read them?

I’m also appearing on WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd with Nancy (we’re on a first-name basis, apparently) on BlogTalk Radio. To call in, you have to register. This newfangled internet! I shouldn’t be ironic, because I actually DON’T know how to work it. But I have faith in you.