It was the messaging … and the fact that it was the most boring book I had ever read up to that point. I was in high school and not really recognizing good writing yet. I should read something else from Steinbeck though so I get the good writing without the dustbowl agony.

Thanks! I think I will work on getting past it so I can see what the rest of the book has in store.

It’s true that the stranger danger mentality is a bigger thing these days and, perhaps unfairly, focused primarily on men. I think my skepticism is mostly affected by the fact that I happen not to be a “kid person”. I mean I love my nephews and friends’ kids just fine and would certainly hep a stranger child in crisis but striking up a friendship with a non-related adolescent girl (or boy)? Nope. I definitely would have gotten very different vibes about it if I had read it as a young person because I was of course completely fascinating and charming at that age 😉 and it wouldn’t have seemed at all weird if some random adult wanted to be my BFF. So yeah. A little bit of my personal foibles and age in there as well. I will give it another try sometime this summer when I’m feeling less stress and more generous towards my fellow humans:). I do enjoy a May-December type romance so have no problems with big age differences as long as everybody is all adulted and it sounds like the book eventually gets there.

Cool. 🙂
I do remember when I started reading adult books – I wonder if that was because I was bored or out of kids books? Hmmmmm. I started reading Agatha Christie, I recall.

I agree. It’s better to be safe!

And also I thought Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books were the best thing ever. *shudder*

Madeleine L’Engle. I read EVERYTHING by her, so many times. The joy is gone, mostly, and I don’t bother any more. What did I ever see in those prissy, over-intellectualized, annoying people? Probably I wanted to be the sort of person who knew, at age 15, who the heck Montaigne is, and could name my dog Fortinbras instead of Shep. I totally thought that naming your dog something in Latin or Shakespeare was a thing cool people did. It’s not. Suck Fairy indeed.

I’m not sure kids get the moral messages nearly as much as we might think. I can clearly remember not picking up on stuff that is completely obvious in those books (I had to be told, in college, by my Jewish boyfriend, about Narnia’s incredibly obvious Christ story, because I’m really not all that bright and I’d read them so young and so many times that the morals were mostly invisible to me). Maybe that’s why the morals in them are so heavy-handed! Kids are in it for the adventure, and can totally miss things like plot coherency and moral messaging.