Maslin Watch: Because We're Young

No Monday Murder Mystery this week, as Janet does a compare-and-contrast with Alison Smith and Martha Tod Dudman, two authors with recent memoirs of their youth. Smith's Name All The Animals gets a comparativelylight version of the synopsis-with-quotes treatment, and only one horrible clunker, which might even have sounded clever when the deadline clock was ticking:

Surrounded by nuns and plagued by secret doubts, she steps outside the bounds of the permissible to have a schoolgirl romance with another schoolgirl.

Dudman's Expecting to Fly appears at a cursory glance to get quoted more often, but she also receives less critical attention, and unfortunately the review stops suddenly on a very weak beat, as if Maslin had hit the word count and decided to go home rather than wrap up whatever thematic strands she was drawing out. (Having to write that piece on movies influencing society for The Week In Review was probably another distraction.) But those are the only glaring missteps I noticed this time around; other than that, the review seems serviceable enough.