I know I should like Daniel Pinkwater, but I just can't. I don't like his writing style, at all. And Madeleine L'Engle... she gave me exactly the skeevy-creepy, guilty-to-like feeling that Lewis did and does. And the reasons were similar (here I go about to contradict my earlier statement about not choosing books for their PCness... it's just...) I LIKED the books, but also felt guilty about liking them, because it was clear to me that they were, in a way, a polemic against everything my family believed in). L'Engle's stuff -- especially the series about Meg's family, starting with A Wrinkle in Time was all about the Christian allegory, and also fairly anti-communist/totalitarian (again, the two are identical in these books). But L'Engle's books have always been even more difficult for me, because they appear to start out championing math-science brainy girls and pure science and physics and so forth. But they're all about angels and theology and the cosmic struggle of angels against Satan, and really quite similar to Lewis' worldview, especially when you get to her retelling of Noah's Ark, which made me ILL. It's true that there are strong and spunky girl heroines in L'Engle, and working scientist mothers. But that Christian subtext... oy. I could never get into her Austin family books.

This icon is Rosa Luxemburg as a teenager. I wonder whether she ever read escapist young adult fiction? I wonder whether there were any books that could have been described as that, in German (or Polish) when she was a teen, in the 1870s or 1880s?