The Popular Crowd (1961)

Anne Emery
1961, The Westminster Press

It's sophmore year and Sue Morgan has one goal: become one of the popular crowd at her high school. A successful summer away has given her confidence, and the local stature of her older brother Gary, a football star at college, has given her a start. She nabs her school's football star, Pete Carroll, and every popular door opens from there. And so what if she no longer has time for old friends or studying? Being popular takes work, and so does keeping Pete happy. Over a long school year, Sue discovers just how much work it takes to stay in the popular crowd.

Pete finds it inconvenient to go steady with Sue when he'd like to date everything that shows interest, and leverages that into constant demands for more necking and more sexual activity.

In his enthusiasm he kissed her long and passionately, prepared to go on from where she had stopped him before. It was a constant battle, Sue thought irritably, pushing him off and finally hitting him hard enough to make him listen.

She quickly becomes sick of fending him off, though the author makes it clear she does enjoy some of the sex play.

Sue felt the excitement building up. Even without liking him too much, she could be easily aroused, and she half dreaded, half anticipated the approaching love-making.

Sadly timeless is Sue's weary, cold-blooded realization halfway through the year that she can live with that, with sexual activity she doesn't enjoy much with a boy she doesn't love. Her unease at his ethical shallowness goes much deeper. His personality can be summed up by his comment:

Say, I like your brother, Sue. He's a real contact.

Pete is an operator. It's interesting that in a book written in what is now considered a sexually repressive time, Emery gives his calculating opportunism as much moral weight as his pressuring Sue for sex.

Sue's siblings are her greatest asset; older brother Gary's popularity is her key into the crowd, while her more thoughtful brother Sandy gives her a different perspective on popularity and Pete, and her little sister Marilyn's progress into the same crowd gives Sue a vague sense of not wanting her baby sister in the same things she's gotten into. Her parents are hopeless; a cipher dad and a mother who accepts everyone at face value.

Sue's progress from adoring the football hero to coldly assessing her complete lack of affection for him - and her dying interest in any boy - is chilling.

Author Bio
1907-1987
Anne Eleanor McGuigan was the eldest of five children with a father who was a professor. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1928, spent a year traveling with her family, and then began teaching. She married John Emery in 1933, and had five children. The Illinois town of Evanston appears to be the model for Sherwood; she lived in Evanston most of her life.


Other Books (with my previous reviews linked)

The Burnabys
Senior Year - about Sally
Going Steady - about Sally
High Note, Low Note
Campus Melody
Sorority Girl

Dinny Gordon Series:
Dinny Gordon, Freshman
Dinny Gordon, Sophomore
Dinny Gordon, Junior
Dinny Gordon, Senior

Jane Ellison 4-H
County Fair
Hickory Hill
Sweet Sixteen

Pat Marlowe
First Love True Love
First Orchid for Pat
First Love Farewell

Sue Morgan
The Popular Crowd
The Losing Game

Other Books
Scarlet Royal
Vagabond Summer
That Archer Girl
Married on Wednesday
A Dream to Touch
Tradition
Bright Horizons
Mountain Laurel
Jennie Lee, Patriot
American Friend: Herbert Hoover
Mystery of the Opal Ring
Danger in a Smiling Mask
Carey's Fortune
The Sky Is Falling
Free Not to Love
Stepfamily

Spy books
A Spy in Old Philadelphia
A Spy in Old Detroit
A Spy in Old New Orleans
A Spy in Old West Point

Links
Image Cascade - the Sue Morgan books

Going Steady (1950)

Going Steady
Anne Emery
1950

Sally Burnaby's a 17-year-old whose long summer after high school graduation is a mixture of the delights of having a steady boyfriend and the frustrations of being almost but not quite an adult. Despite the dated nature of the material - did that world ever exist, even in 1950? - and the way the author's evasion of certain topics makes her heroine look a bit dim at times, it's a more honest examination of being female, young and (inescapably) naive than most of the current crop of cutting-edge problem novels.

At the book's start, Sally appears to be just a cute teenager. She's completely absorbed with her boyfriend, Scotty, and restless with being more than a child and less than an adult in a busy family. She's set to attend college in the fall, but she grows increasingly aggravated by her own sense of inadequacy as the summer progresses. Scotty, for all his good qualities, possesses that typically male trait of overweening confidence, and Sally grows anxious to gain his approval. She's indifferent to tennis and diving, but struggles to get better at both because he excels at them and simply expects her to want to improve. She can drive a modern reader insane with this, and with the way she hesitates to even share a difference of opinion. But has this really changed? Don't many girls still fall into line with male opinion, become caught up in trying to 'live up' to male expectations even in subjects and fields that don't interest them? A more frustrating anarchronism is the way Sally's parents agonize over how the relationship will impact Scotty. I do not like this behavior, having had a similar conversation once with a brother who implored me not to 'hurt' a boyfriend. Boy-boy loyalty apparently trumps blood ties.

Apart from her romance, Sally's other major concern in this summer is her position in her family, and how that's changing. Aware suddenly that all her friends have summer jobs, she realizes belatedly that maybe she's expected to work too. When she does get a job, she hates it, does it poorly, and realizes belatedly that she was wrong to approach it with such slipshod indifference. And she spends her first paycheck on a frivolous item instead of contributing to the family finances or buying a needed coat. These are somewhat old-fashioned ideas; I wonder how many middle-class kids really feel pressured to help support themselves at 17 today - but one thing is timeless. Sally feels that all her bad decisions are irrevocable, that she just keeps digging herself in deeper without remedy. She's haunted by a steadily worsening sense of having repeatedly failed to understand or figure out the right thing, whether it be with Scotty or her job or her family. What she thought would be a beautiful summer with her steady boyfriend turns into a long, hard season of growing up, and by the end of it, both she and Scotty are panicking, so frustrated by their family woes and personal confusion that they agree to take a leap into a different life. But is marriage at 17 really what Sally wants?

The terms of 'going steady' are utterly outdated and adorable and largely alien to anyone born after 1940. Sally's observations of her coworker Carol, a 26-year-old who's desperate to find a husband and escape drudge work, are painfully realistic, even in the 21st century. Go to any library and choose 3 books with pastel covers, and they'll all be chick lit with Carol as the heroine. The only difference will be the modern format's fantasist insistence that most Carols are actually successful career women with expensive shoe collections. Sally's friend Millie, on the other hand, probably doesn't exist anymore. Sudden pregnancy usually derails modern youth engagements, it doesn't result in shotgun
marriages.

Author Bio
1907-1987
Anne Eleanor McGuigan was the eldest of five children with a father who was a professor. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1928, spent a year travelling with her family, and then began teaching. She married John Emery in 1933, and had five children. The Illinois town of Evanston appears to be the model for Sherwood; she lived in Evanston most of her life.

Other Books
About the Burnabys
Senior Year - about Sally
Going Steady - about Sally
High Note, Low Note
Campus Melody

Dinny Gordon Series:
Dinny Gordon, Freshman
Dinny Gordon, Sophomore
Dinny Gordon, Junior
Dinny Gordon, Senior

Jane Ellison 4-H
County Fair
Hickory Hill
Sweet Sixteen

Pat Marlowe
First Love True Love
First Orchid for Pat
First Love Farewell

Sue Morgan
The Popular Crowd
The Losing Game

Other Books
Scarlet Royal
Vagabond Summer
That Archer Girl
Married on Wednesday
A Dream to Touch
Tradition
Bright Horizons
Mountain Laurel
Jennie Lee, Patriot
American Friend: Herbert Hoover
Mystery of the Opal Ring
Danger in a Smiling Mask
Carey's Fortune
The Sky Is Falling
Free Not to Love
Stepfamily

Spy books
A Spy in Old Philadelphia
A Spy in Old Detroit
A Spy in Old New Orleans
A Spy in Old West Point


Links
Image Cascade Publishing

Sorority Girl

Sorority Girl
Anne Emery
1952, The Westminster Press

She had always been aware of the Nightingales. The Nightingales and the Amigas were two highly exclusive girls' organizations whose membership comprised about ten per cent of the girls in the school, by special and coveted invitation. The "best girls" belonged to one or the other, the girls with the pretty complexions, the smart clothes, the lovely hair - the successfully glamorous girls who dated the outstanding boys. Jean had always been aware of them, with the resentment of the outsider toward the clique, mixed with a kind of helpless envy.

Jean Burnaby is a junior in Sherwood High School now, and determined to make a mark. She starts the school year intending to 'have lots of activities, make many new friends and gain recognition for achievement.' Instead, she loses herself in a sorority. At Sherwood, secret societies are banned - but the Nightingales and the Amigas fly under the radar by posing as charitable organizations. Of course, they are anything but - they're exclusive private clubs that exist for the joy of separating the sheep from the goats. Jean soon discovers that the privilege of being a sheep and included in the realm of the popular girls comes at a price - she's shunned from other organizations, loses a class election, and is treated with wary dislike by her fellow classmates. Isolated from non-sorority members, she finds the Nightingales increasingly annoying as well. And the boy she truly likes, Jeff, isn't a member of the corresponding fraternity. But to be in this group is to be branded "the best" and how can she give that up?

Another tale of a sensible girl having her head turned by sudden popularity, and the price of that popularity. Interestingly, although there are a few things Jean dislikes about the sorority - the girls will drink beer, their parties can be a little too much for her, their casual dismissal of others - the book doesn't really make a case that the sorority sisters are themselves bad or behaving very badly, but that the sorority system is simply flawed. Over the course of the year, Jean just becomes too uncomfortable with the calculated hypocrisy of a service organization ostrasizing people, and the level of artifice.

The writing is very strong, with excellent descriptions, powerful characters and sense of place.

Before the hall mirror she brushed her hair again and arranged her lipstick with critical fingers. She found her notebook and pencil and pen, looked down at her plaid gingham dres, wishing it were cool enough to wear a new fall outfit, and let herself out the big front door.

Jean makes a heroine who's appealing and yet realistically somewhat unlikeable at times.

Other

I didn't realize there were high school frats and sororities, but apparently...

Wiki

Available New
Image Cascade

Author Bio
1907-1987
Anne Eleanor McGuigan was the eldest of five children with a father who was a professor. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1928, spent a year travellign with her family, and then began teaching. She married John Emery in 1933, and had five children. The Illinois town of Evanston appears to be the model for Sherwood; she lived in Evanston most of her life.

Other Books

About the Burnabys
Senior Year - about Sally
Going Steady - about Sally
High Note, Low Note
Campus Melody

Dinny Gordon Series:
Dinny Gordon, Freshman
Dinny Gordon, Sophomore
Dinny Gordon, Junior
Dinny Gordon, Senior

Jane Ellison 4-H
County Fair
Hickory Hill
Sweet Sixteen

Pat Marlowe
First Love True Love
First Orchid for Pat
First Love Farewell

Sue Morgan
The Popular Crowd
The Losing Game

Other Books
Scarlet Royal
Vagabond Summer
That Archer Girl
Married on Wednesday
A Dream to Touch
Tradition
Bright Horizons
Mountain Laurel
Jennie Lee, Patriot
American Friend: Herbert Hoover
Mystery of the Opal Ring
Danger in a Smiling Mask
Carey's Fortune
The Sky Is Falling
Free Not to Love
Stepfamily

Spy books
A Spy in Old Philadelphia
A Spy in Old Detroit
A Spy in Old New Orleans
A Spy in Old West Point