Cress Delahanty
by Jessamyn West
Category: History

The tenderly funny story of a modern girl’s growing up. Cress Delahanty, growing up on a California ranch, might have been you at sixteen, your teenage daughter or niece, or the girl next door. You will watch her progress, as her parents did, with amusement and an occasional touch of exasperation and a twinge of heartache at the memory of your own growing pains. She’s the girl who invented Delahanty’s Law for Saving Time. The high-school kid who decided craziness would be her trademark. The love-smitten adolescent who found a unique way to attract the boys. Not since Penrod—that classic by another Indiana author—has the magic, the humor and the seriousness of adolescence been so warmly and sympathetically portrayed in an American novel. “An enchanting novel...those still capable of feeling the absurdity and the beauty of growing up will find it a book well worth treasuring in that library of libraries, the heart.”—CLIFTON FADIMAN, The book-of-the-Month Club News “Cress Delahanty has all the makings of a classic.”—Hartford Courant “An extraordinarily engaging, humorous and touching book about a teenage girl.”—The New York Times “It does for an adolescent girl what Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye did for her male counterpart.”—Los Angeles Mirror