when family makes you nuts

Cassie Stephens is about to start high school, and she’s worried. Truth is, she worries about a lot of things. She worries about what high school will be like, especially since she’s planning on running for freshperson class president. She and her best friend Vicky, a staunch feminist, are wanting to change the entire leadership of the class, so it’s genuinely representative of the class and not just the same popular clique who gets voted into everything.

She’s also worried about what’s happening at home. She’s always felt insecure next to her gorgeous older sister, and now that they’re going to be in the same school, Stephie doesn’t want Cassie to let anyone know that they’re related. Her younger brother Andrew is a great brother though, and he has a bunch of pets, since he wants to be a vet. But her parents are always arguing, and while Stephie can usually call her boyfriend and get out of the house for awhile, Cassie and Andrew can’t always get away from the shouting.

And Cassie worries about her health. She has asthma, and sometimes it feels like her lungs are filling with water and she can’t breathe. She worries about being a burden to her friends. She worries about not doing well enough in school. And she worries about her relationship with Ben, which may turn into a thing. She’s never had a boyfriend before, and she’s worried she’ll screw it up.

In other words, she’s a teenager.

To help with her anxiety, she eats pistachios. It’s what she uses to help her cope, even though she knows it’s only a temporary fix. But as she slowly learns to navigate high school, she also starts to learn that those around her can help her with her anxiety. And she thinks maybe one day she can give up her pistachio habit.

Or maybe not.

I first read Paula Danziger’s The Pistachio Prescription when I was a kid, far too many years to count. It wasn’t my favorite back then, as I couldn’t connect with Cassie as much as I did with other characters from Danziger’s writing. But I still enjoyed reading it. I loved celebrating with Cassie when the good things happened for her, and feeling sad when the bad things happened. But I always knew that there were readers out there who could connect with Cassie and that her story was important.

Reading this again as an adult brought up lots of nostalgia and warm fuzzies for me. I will forever be a fan of Paula Danziger. And while there are certainly things about this story that are dated, the basic human emotions, the need to connect with others, the struggle to ask for help can all be just as strong in modern times as it was back in the 1970s. It’s also a perfect snapshot of time from the ‘70s, so if you want to know what it was like to be a teenager before smartphones and streaming services, even before most households had a computer. This is where I grew up, in the pages of Paula Danziger, and I think more readers should get to know what that’s like.

While this is not the cover of the ebook I read recently, it is the cover of the paperback I had as a teenager, and I couldn’t resist adding it here.