All Shook Up

This YA debut speaks to the continued interest in the teen culture of the 1950s—Elvis Presley, teenage rebellion—with a young girl embarking on adventure and music, ultimately uncovering family secrets.

Being fourteen is especially hard in 1956, when the world is changing around you. Honor student Paula Levy was born into a family of historical victims: her mother’s youth was lost in the Depression and her father’s was destroyed in the Holocaust, an as-yet-unnamed event about which no one speaks. But Paula has heard the new music taking hold of the nation—rock and roll—and it has given her hope. And she has two friends to get her through life’s ups and downs: Holden Caulfield, hero of Catcher in the Rye, who shares her view of the world, and Barbara, a “cool” girl in her high school who unexpectedly shares Paula’s view of Holden.

Paula’s mother is not a fan of Barbara, and she prohibits her daughter from associating with her. Paula manages to get around her mother’s rule and see Barbara anyway—but when Paula asks the wrong questions about her father’s past and Barbara is caught with her “boyfriend,” their private world of Holden, rock, and Elvis Presley crumbles. Angry with the adults in their lives, the two girls run away to find Barbara’s real father, a jazz musician. Disappointingly, he does not live in a mansion or socialize with Elvis—but Paula and Barbara may get something even better than a brush with celebrity by the end of their journey.

Enid Wolfe Langbert was not as adventurous as her protagonist, Paula, in high school, but she made up for it in the sixties by marching, sitting in, and raging against segregation and the war while, in her spare time, raising three children. Eventually, she went to law school. She loved zealously advocating for her clients as an attorney, whether they deserved it or not, until her husband became ill and she closed her practice to care for him. After he passed, she traveled widely and enrolled in an English literature master’s program. She is now writing her thesis, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s legal issues on his writing of Finnegans Wake—a topic about which she is unambiguously passionate. Enid lives in New York City.