Back Cover Copy for 5 Vintage YA Books I Totally Haven’t Read

I bought these five incredible vintage YA books at a used bookstore in Cape May. I’m going to tell you what they’re about. Before I read them.

Aspiring hard-rock goddess Janie Tonight is mortified when her bandmate Mike Good hits his head on a drainpipe and shows up at Battle of the Bands with a mullet, striped suspenders, and an air of intolerable self-satisfaction. If she drapes a liturgical stole around her neck and acts like he doesn’t exist, will he go away? Or will Good rock Tonight in new and unexpected ways?

In the book that secretly inspired George RR Martin’s infamous Kings Landing plot, golden-haired twins Julie and Jason are enmeshed in a scandalous affair that will rock Woodmont High if word gets out. To deflect prying eyes, Julie takes up with a helmet-haired, weak-willed dope called Marcus. Smitten, he buys her a terrier named B.J. and lets her dip her brother’s old Tonka trucks in black paint and drive them up and down his jungle-print shirt. But when Marcus discovers Julie undoing Jason’s white pleated pants in the Woodmont High boiler room, he breaks it off in a disgusted rage and sets B.J. free behind a Dunkin’ Donuts. “Better B.J. on her own than B.J. in a den of sin,” he muses in the book’s melancholy dénouement.

Will Sandy and Jeanette survive fourteen? It doesn’t look good: Sandy’s disastrous home perm just won’t relax, and Jeanette can’t leave the house unless she’s dressed like Lovey Howell from Gilligan’s Island. Their sizzling makeout sessions in Jeanette’s walk-in closet are the only thing that saves year fourteen from being a total wash…but when they get into a fight over a Pepto-pink poly-blend housedress, will their romance droop like a marabou boa in July?

Amy can barely contain her excitement when dreamboat Hank invites her to the prom. She knows just what she’ll wear: The rose chiffon dress haunted by the ghost of her vengeful great-aunt! As prom night approaches, the cursed frock ensnares Amy in its sinister thrall, causing her to wear yellow with black, levitate vases above her bed, and send herself dead corsages. Hank intervenes on prom night just as she’s commanding her twelve thousand wallpaper flowers to come alive and join her army of darkness. They burn the dress in a trash can and go roller skating instead.

Zealous neatnik Christopher is content with his comfortable life: ironing his shorts twice a day, shuffling through senior year with a hazmat suit over his tennis whites. But then his wacky mom gives him a dirt-desensitization assignment: a date with her best friend’s filth-loving daughter Megan, who’s registered as a walking biohazard in thirty-six states.

Chris knows the drill: he’s supposed to fall in love as this Manic Pixie Dirt Girl shows him the life-affirming wonders of encrusting oneself in grime. But in real life he stands awkwardly at the table as she shovels pizza in her maw: barely hiding his horror at the cheese oozing into her palm, the sauce spattering her shorts and table like blood at a fresh crime scene. God, the stains, the stains are setting, he thinks, a tense smile frozen on his face. And her sundae…ugh, help, it’s melting into horrid brown glop! Why the hell didn’t she wait to order it?? He can’t bring himself to eat. His clothes feel too tight. Phantom bugs crawl up his arms, burrowing under his thrice-laundered Lacoste shirt. When she cheerfully suggests they follow dinner with a dumpster dive, Chris runs screaming into the night—and bumps into a girl in rubber gloves who just might hold the tiny disinfected key to his heart.

What’s your favorite vintage YA cover? Link to it in the comments below and I’ll post a bonus cover this week!

 
[EDIT: I asked, you answered. So here’s the bonus cover, featuring an awesome painting by one “Mark Skolsky” that positively shrieks 1987. I leave it to you to decide which is the worst element: the scrunchie/hair-fountain flashback, the wacky haw-haw sexism, or the fact that the narrator’s name is legitimately HOBIE.]