Book Review: To Tell Your Love

Title: To Tell Your Love

Author: Mary Stolz

Date: 1950

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: none

Length: 220 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Artur Marokvia

Quote: “Am I so much in love, she wondered. For three years she’d watched and dreamed of and thought of Douglas Eamons.”

Anne Armacost, recent high school graduate, is not yet in love. For six months she’s had a nice age-appropriate casual-dating relationship with the school friend on whom she’s always had a crush, and in the course of this novel that relationship is going to fall apart, partly because the teenagers are growing apart and partly because Anne has made it too obvious that she’s in love with love. Anne thinks her heart is breaking.

But actually she’s living amidst real love, with profoundly nice parents, a snarky but lovable little brother, and a beautiful older sister, and also in the course of the story the older sister Theo, who is old enough to “fall in love,” gets a happier romance with the young man all the twenty-something girls think they want.

Scholastic’s cover for the 1966 reprint is pretty horrible, communicating that Anne is going to be on her own, horrors, not half of a couple at the end of the book, by giving her the look of an awkward thirteen-year-old and gray hair. The walls are rich chestnut, the sunshine outside the window is yellow, and the girl has gray hair. By 1966 Stolz’s fans knew they could expect a good read no matter how bad a job had been done with the cover, but, for those who don’t know, here’s what could be expected from this author:

1. Memorable, distinctive characters. Stolz wrote many novels and reused several situations, but each novel had a distinctive cast of characters. Anne isn’t like Anny in Wait for Me Michael, who had a crush on a much older man, or Dodie in Pray Love Remember, where the boyfriend died, or Lotta in Who Wants Music on Monday, where the pretty blonde extrovert sister was selfish and spoiled enough to make the boy prefer the quirky brown-haired artist sister.

2. Empathy for the parents. Stolz didn’t always write whole scenes from the viewpoint of the parents in shorter stories for younger readers, but in her novels for teenagers she always offered glimpses of the parents alone with each other and with adult friends. In the 1960s much was said about how teenagers and adults couldn’t understand each other. Stolz’s characters don’t always understand each other, but readers can understand both generations.

3. Insight into each of the characters, even the animal characters, in each story. Stolz famously wrote The Bully of Barkham Street and A Dog on Barkham Street, companion novels, describing the same incidents from the viewpoint of the bully and his victim. In To Tell Your Love we get several scenes featuring fourteen-year-old Johnny as well as Anne and Theo.

4. Cat and dog characters. Stolz observed pets closely and gave each family of human characters a suitable pet, or pets. In To Tell Your Love the Armacosts’ oversized cat, July, wins a prize in the neighborhood children’s pet show.

5. Memorable turns of phrase. Stolz characters often major or majored in English, quote poetry, and/or make up lines of their own that summarize situations as vividly as poetry.

Even in college I remember waiting for each year’s new Stolz book; as an adult, going back and reading the ones that were wearing out and going out of print when I was born, I’m delighted to find that Stolz’s novels about teenagers offer some insights and delights for middle-aged people too.

If you’re looking for a cozy, wholesome story with a young adult romance, late teen angst, early teen comedy, and intelligent adult conversation in it, don’t be put off by the girl’s gray hair and bleak expression. Anne is sad, yes, but she’s not too depressed to enjoy Theo’s romance or Johnny’s misadventures. She's a Bright Young Thing with all her road before her. Her happily-ever-after romance was just waiting to become a sequel (I don't know whether the sequel was ever written).

Some books by this author have become rare and expensive, but To Tell Your Love sold well enough that this web site can still offer our usual price: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, and at least six books of this size would fit into one $5 package.