The Sky Is Falling

by Anne Emery

From the jacket copy:

What about pot?
A frank and contemporary story
of one girl's experience with the drug scene.

An urgent picture of the smoky, dream-filled world behind the scenes on many campuses, of the young people who retire to it as an escape from pressing problems, and of those who reject it but still find themselves involved.

**********************
Trying to start a new life after getting off pot, a college girl is plunged into a new dilemma when she discovers her older brother is headed for serious trouble because he is using drugs.

159 pages

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Anne Emery was born Anne Eleanor McGuigan, in Fargo, North Dakota, and moved to Evanston, Illinois, when she was nine years old. Miss McGuigan attended Evanston Township High School and Northwestern University. Following her graduation from college, her father, a university professor, took the family of five children abroad for a year, where they visited his birthplace in Northern Ireland, as well as the British Isles, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Miss McGuigan spent nine months studying at the University of Grenoble in France. She taught seventh and eighth grades for four years in the Evanston Schools, and fourth and fifth grades for six more years after her marriage to John Emery. She retired from teaching to care for her husband and five children, Mary, Kate, Joan, Robert, and Martha.

Anne Emery wrote books and short stories for teen girls throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her understanding of the lives of teenaged girls creates believable stories and characters that are readable and re-readable!

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anne Emery tries to stay relevant! This book is OK; she didn't do a terrible job of staying in touch, I think, and a lot of the humor is from the things we know about drugs that they didn't back then. Evergreen State College is a great setting for this book, and the northwest Washington coast sounds amazing (though maybe not if you're running away from crazed potheads).

[Laurie]

I want to read this for the Washington State setting. (I was just telling Wendy about another vintage YA set partly on the Washington Coast, Fair Exchange. It was good.)

Update: Rather lurid 1970 story about the dangers of drug use--you'll fail your classes, forget your ambitions, and possibly jump out of high windows. Free Not to Love, also by Emery, was more thoughtful and sensitive. But this one was kind of fun.

I love that these vintage YAs are so short (this one was 159 pages). It seems like all the current YA I've been reading is about 300 pages, and in many cases the writing (and the readers) suffer for it.