To All the YA I've Loved Before Pink Plaid Media

We are so sad to be wrapping up this Dear Diary season, but happy to have our favorite complicated woman of history, Marie Antoinette, to do it with. We read Marie Antoinette, Princess of Versailles of The Royal Diaries series by Kathryn Lasky (published in 2000) and we have a lot to say about this teenage future queen of France. 

Join us for a Royal History for Dummies, where we hate on royalty in all its forms, fangirl over Sophia Coppola’s take on MA (and her films in general), and parse through our feelings about the way legacies of “Bad Women” are talked about. Plus, did you know that even back in 1700s France, teenage girls still had to feign interest in their boyfriend’s hobbies in order to impress them? Some things never change…



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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love" 

This episode is all about Titanic Culture, one of the most important things to hit our little 8 year old brains. Everyone was hopping on the Titanic obsession back in the late 90s, and Scholastic was no exception. Enter Voyage on the Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, R.M.S. Titanic, 1912 (By Ellen Emerson White). Yep, we’re finally getting into the Dear America books that were absolutely everything in our childhood. 



Discussions of topic include: Billy Zane, what it means to be consumptive, and the class dynamics of the Titanic. Plus, the universal truth of Britney Spears' “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and how it weaves its way through Young Adult Fiction. 



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You can find citations, notes, and further reading on this episode at our website 

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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love" 

In this episode, Phoebe’s Diary by Phoebe Wahl (pub. 2023) allowed us to take our own trip down memory lane back to being a teenager in 2006. In a fictionalized diary based on her teenage years, Phoebe Wahl explores embarrassing moments, first boyfriends, and know-it-all older sisters that we spend the episode connecting with and sharing our own stories of. 



Discussions of topic include: getting weird old-timey illnesses in high school, the time of skinny jeans (and thinking it was so cool when our boyfriends wore ours), and how much we miss Myspace. Plus, how the YA books we’re reading now have been inspiring us to try new things as adults.



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You can find citations, notes, and further reading on this episode at our website 

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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love" 

We revisited The Healing Time of Hickeys by Karen Rivers (published in 2003) about 20 years after we read it the first time, which means we spotted a lot of the things that made us who we are in the pages of this book.

This weird girl lit came at us in a time we needed it the most our freshmen year of high school. Haley Andromeda went through all the same things we did — bad haircuts, terrible crushes, complex friendships — with so much humor and love. Two decades later, we still recognize the things she taught us about ourselves…and about hickeys. 



Content Warning: This book talks a bit about an inappropriate student/teacher relationship, and we have a brief discussion about it.



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You can find citations, notes, and further reading on this episode at our website 

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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love" 

A contemporary queer YA romance novel written in letters? Set in Minneapolis, Minnesota? With lots of Prince talk? Wow, what a treat We Contain Multitudes by Sarah Henstra (published in 2019) was for us this week.



Topics of discussion include: stinky ex-boyfriends, lots of Minneapolis talk, and poetic boners. Plus, we love a YA character who can’t help but cry! So relatable.



Content Warning: Abuse, homophobia, brief mentions of suicide, and drug use



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You can find citations, notes, and further reading on this episode at our website 

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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love" 

This week’s book is all about learning how to stay Best Friends 4Ever from across the country, something we personally know a little about after moving so far away from each other :(. We read P.S. Longer Letter Later by Paula Danziger and Ann M. Martin, published in 1998. Main characters Tara*Starr and Elizabeth’s only source of communication is snail mail as they write to each other about their problems of finding new friends, dealing with their changing families, and the complications of seventh grade.



Discussions of topic include: preteen girl rage, our AIM screen names of the past, and great book outfit descriptions featuring Doc Martens. Plus, our own experiences of the hell that was middle school. We loved looking back on this piece of nostalgic “juvenile” fiction so much!







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You can find citations, notes, and further reading on this episode at our website 

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Theme Music by Slip.stream - "In And Out Of Love"