Book Review: When We Began

Title: When We Began

Author: Judy Corry

Date: 2019

Publisher: Judy Corry

ISBN: 978-1-057862-03-3

Quote: "Since when did Liam get muscles?" 

Ah, the agony and the ecstasy of falling "in love" while you and your beloved are still growing...

Liam is Cassie's best friend's brother, ahead of them but still in high school. His current identity is "quarterback." Cassie likes sports, too, but since age thirteen or fourteen, when her father left her home, she's been obsessed with being cute and blonde, pairing up with a different boy every few weeks and privately wondering whether males ever want to stay with their mates.

A clue I wish more heroines of young adult fiction would get: Males are biologically programmed to pursue. One thing that would help a lot of young women find True Love would be to stop chasing men and wait to be chased. 

Judy Corry doesn't try to stand up to the current fad for insisting on women's "equal right" to be rejected, nor does she idealistically insist that Cassie find something beyond a hormone-sodden body to offer a prospective mate. She is, after all, a bestselling author. High school girls apparently love when she dives right inside Liam's head and tells us all about how, underneath his normal teenaged boy thoughts about football and acting cool to impress his friends, he's really thinking thoughts that sound exactly like the wisdom of the high school guidance counsellor.  

Anyway, Liam and Cassie were friends, years ago, when both of them liked basketball. At a party during a timed kissing game, Liam wasn't sure he knew how to kiss, so he said that kissing his sister's friend would be like kissing his sister. Ever since he's been sarcastically watching her throw herself at other boys and leap away from them next week. He's had few dates, by choice, because he'd really rather be kissing a friend (points to him for that; he's a rare one) than a stranger who hurls her hormone-sodden body at him. This is the summer when, after Cassie gets Liam stuck changing diapers and Liam grabs the handful of shaving cream Cassie was going to apply to his face and applies it to hers, they goad each other into going on a "practice date" with no kissing or touching--just using good manners and having a serious conversation. 

No points for guessing where this leads. The young and young-at-heart enjoy the trip, anyway. It's a well written short novel, of which I received a free review copy because by now there are literally a couple dozen more available on Amazon. You can read about how all of Liam's and Cassie's school friends pair off too, then move on to other fictional schools...

What may startle adults is that we're told the same toddler has been soiling diapers through two summers in a row. The family act as if nothing is wrong with him. Apparently the latest fad in "parenting" is avoiding toilet training traumas by letting kids waddle around in the newer, more absorbent, disposable diapers until they're in school, maybe on into their school years, why not, that's profitable for the disposable diaper industry. I've been in homes like that. I visited a child of the age when children in my family usually show their major talents; since the parents had talents I was eager to find out what the child's talents might be, and, spare and deliver us all, the poor little thing was still flopping over on the couch beside a parent, in front of strangers, and whining to be cleaned. Kittens have more self-respect than that. A few gentle hints, like "This is where big kids go. This is what big girls do: pants down, skirts up, hear that sound?" plus a supply of oldfashioned, reusable, cotton rag diapers, ought to help.

Anyway Corry knew her audience. This book sold; it sold more like it; actual teenagers are in the audience for these books. For wit, characterization, insight, observation, etc., in comparison with the bestselling teen romances my generation read, it rates below M.E. Kerr, Paula Danziger, Ellen Conford, or Lenora Mattingly Weber but well above Judy Blume. About even with Betty Cavanna, I'd say.