“We’re doing it, we’re doing it! Stop being so testy.”

45. Birthday Party Demon – Wendy Dalrymple

Teenage best friends having the kind of sweet sixteen that didn’t involve throwing a fit and a new car, just pizza (apparently frozen, how disappointing), cake, ice cream, and rented videos – Pumpkinhead and Clueless, just to juxtapose the kind of messages this book sends. Tina, Lacey, and Eve are all going in different directions in high school, and Tina thinks she’s being left behind, but they’re all in for her sixteenth birthday. It was nice to see a group coming back together like this instead of that false bravado teen girls can get when they join new groups at school and don’t want to get any loser on them.

And I guess they had a nice, wholesome experience with an Ouija board when they were kids. It just showed them where missing stuff was and didn’t bring them an entity to ruin their lives or haunt their house. Weird. But Tina and her lack of self-confidence and unrequited crush situation have a black blob following. That black blob was just looking for an opportunity to possess someone and it gets the chance when they use the board and also do light as a feather, stiff as a board. Uh oh.

This was very cute and didn’t take long to read. I also definitely liked that the Delia*s catalogue was turned into Daria*s. Daria is still one of my most beloved figures. And I never liked that caps and lowercase in the same word style, so I won’t be hurting anyone’s eyes.

 

Snuffy knows there’s no reason to have disappointing food on your birthday. Real corn, certainly never frozen corn for her.