Book Review: Who Wants Music on Monday?

This post originally appeared here on Blogspot with some links that rotted and needed to be removed. Without those links, it seems timely, so here it is again. What I forgot to put in, while putting in five links none of which is useful any more, was that this was one of my very favorite books in high school. If the high school librarian had done as most of the grade school teachers did and let everyone pick a book off the shelf to keep, this would have been my pick.

Title: Who Wants Music on Monday?

Author: Mary Slattery Stolz

Publisher: Harper & Row

Date: 1963

Length: 267 pages

What a disappointment being a parent must be, Cassie muses, midway through this book. You look forward to your children's being a comfort and a joy, and then you get...a son like Aaron. Or a daughter like Cassie.

Cassie, the skinny introvert artist in the family, is what her older brother calls "absolutely letter-perfect honest about everything in life," and Who Wants Music on Monday is to some extent the story of how she develops enough private feelings to understand the value of tact. Cassie enjoys some immunity to high school crushes because her older brother is the object of her idealistic love--idealistic not in the sense that she thinks he's perfect, but in the sense that she wants to be the perfect, adoring sister. At the beginning of the story boys have yet to notice that Cassie is a girl.

However, in the course of the story, Cassie notices a boy, Aaron, and he notices her, at about the same time...and then Lotta, the fluffy blonde middle child in the family, develops a crush on this boy too. After all, they have things in common: both of them are employed as entertainers at children's parties.

All late bloomers, younger sisters, and girls who've deliberately chosen to hang out with friends who seem more popular or sophisticated, will love what happens next. (If your friend or sister is nicer than Lotta, the story is still a delicious warning to her.)

Let's just say that at the end of the story Cassie has three solid friends outside the family, one of whom is Aaron, and Lotta has some growing up to do. Lotta thought she was popular. And mature.

What's not to love? Well...at fourteen, I remember being disappointed that there's not much music in the book. In 1963 teen novels were selling like hotcakes and publishers were trying to tag each one with a unique, clever title. "Who wants music on Monday?" is a throwaway line uttered when the mother and aunt are eating lunch in a restaurant that advertises live music, but doesn't have a band on Mondays. This is not a book about music or musicians. If anything it's a book about differences.

Mary Slattery Stolz was one of the best authors of the late twentieth century. She specialized in stories about sensitive, introspective young people, partly because they allowed her to call readers' attention to the thoughts and feelings of the adult characters too. Cassie tries to understand why her parents seem to prefer Lotta's way of being a teenager to her way, and why her Irish-American father (who's never actually been in Ireland) is prejudiced against both of her brother's very nice roommates (one's an English expatriate and one's African-American).

Writing about sensitive, socially conscious characters also made Stolz's young adult novels real period pieces. Sometimes the factors that date the books aren't the ones that seem meant to place the books in time. Fluffy pale yellow sweaters have come back in and out of fashion since 1963, and had even, as one Amazon reviewer suggests, been a possible time-stamp for a story set in the 1950s. What's definitely 1963 is the sense of the girls needing work, and only being eligible for gender-specific, lower-paid jobs. (Not to mention Dave's willingness to attend an almost all-White college where he's always conspicuous and sometimes a target...readers already knew about that time-stamp.)

Another time-stamp is the important plot element of Lotta's being an entrepreneur. She and one or more buddies collect small amounts of cash for supervising children's parties. Parents are willing to spend that kind of money on small, home-based birthday parties with only three to six guests. Parents are willing to hire teenyboppers to supervise the parties. One "strange," very rich and trendsetting couple even trust their seven-year-old birthday girl to entertain her little friends, and supervise three teenagers the parents haven't actually met, all by herself..."She doesn't have the sort of childhood babies cry for," one of the girls observes about this child, while another one can't get over the child's not clinging to a parent's hand--is she an alien disguised as a child?

If you want to find the political element in everything, you may enjoy remembering the trade-off. Lotta works harder than Aaron, and collects less money, even as an entrepreneur, and Lotta would definitely be stuck in a pink-collar job--perhaps, like her aunt, working her way up from cashier to floor manager or buyer if she made a "career" of doing student labor in one place all her life. On the other hand, it's ever so much easier for Lotta to open a business of her own, which has the potential of becoming the real career of her dreams, than it would be today.

Peer pressure would definitely be applied to any parent who let three teenagers supervise a party for their birthday child these days, especially if one of the teenagers was a boy. However, there are people, about the age Lotta would be if she'd been real, who still make a business of entertaining at children's parties. (When this review was originally posted, it contained an advertisement for a local couple who did that. Their web site is no longer functional. That's why the post was pulled and reposted.)

What I would like to call to your attention, Gentle Readers, is yet another social change. In 1963 the child who didn't fall to pieces, emotionally, when her parents blew off her birthday party, seemed like an alien freak. I read the book, not for the first time, in 1983 and thought, "By now everybody knows a child like that." By 1993 I'd taken a class where the professor argued that children whose parents left them in day-care-type environments, routinely, could be considered to have been blessed with precocious "social skills." By 2012 I'm afraid that the child character Ella may seem normal to young readers. And I'll bet you can't visualize her as a trim, healthy, active child, either.

When this review originally appeared, some of The Nephews were small children who had a terrible choice: their father thought they needed to be plugged in to all the current electronic fads, at his house; their mother, grandmother, and aunt agreed that they needed a place to unplug at Grandma's house. The kids loved the real world of real, physical interactions with adults, plants, animals, food, swimming pools, and so on. What made them wistful and misty-eyed was the thought of sharing comparable unplugged quality time with Daddy.

Do the children you know feel the same way? I recommend finding out before the birthday bash. Hire the clowns, by all means, and learn from the professionals along with the child. Try clowning around the house. Try baking cake from scratch, too, and playing the real-world games with the child in real time. Children become able to have more fun and remember it better as they grow up, so regularly spending summer vacation time with them almost guarantees that each summer will be the best one they ever had.