I Have Gone Over To The YA Side

A friend and I were doing a tour of a couple of tiny independent bookstores and felt we should buy books at each one. You know, to commemorate the experience. The way other friends shopping might buy jewelry or shoes.

I picked up Mystery Ride by Robert Boswell who in some circles (middle-aged ones) would be considered quite a hotty. The book was published back in 1993, so, yeah, I got it off a sale table because while I wanted to commemorate the experience, I didn't want to pay full price to do so.

Anyway, Mystery Ride is a very well-written book. It's about a network of people connected by family relations and friendship. My problem with this book was not with the book at all. It was with me.

Bizarrely enough, I wasn't terribly interested in the adult characters who seemed to get into big discussions about how to live. I don't know, maybe I just don't care about that. As I was reading the book, I kept thinking, Wow, am I ever shallow.

I was interested in the teen characters. There was this one girl, Dulcie, who was a raving maniac. Whenever the story shifted to her, all of a sudden I perked up. And then there was a good girl, Roxanne, who was born again and got pregnant on purpose by her fundamentalist boyfriend so their parents would let them get married. How interesting is that? I thought it was interesting, anyway.

After I got over being upset by my own shallowness, I began to wonder if maybe I've read so much YA that I've started feeling more sympathy and attachment to those kinds of characters.

I guess that's okay. So long as I don't start wearing low blue jeans and skimpytops, anyway.

By the way, Mystery Ride was the basis for television movie a few years back, 12 Mile Road. I didn't see it, but the description at the CBS website sounds as if the movie focused on the daughter.