The Jitterbug Girl

by Donna T. Van Straten and Donna Van Straten Remmert

"The Jitterbug Girl" is a funny, happy memoir about what it was like to be a teenager living in a small American town and belonging to a large Catholic family in the early 1950s. You will laugh out... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971095914
• ISBN13: 9780971095915
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: RemArt Publishing
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Times Press Review of "The Jitterbug Girl"

Any girl who grew up in small-town America can find at least some of her story in "The Jitterbug Girl" by Donna Van Straten Remmert. This is an excerpt from her night as prom queen."David Peotter is 6'4" tall. This is great as a basketball player, but it's not great for a guy whose queen is 5'2" tall. When we danced our solo dance to 'Stranger in Paradise,' my face was pushed smack-dab into his armpit. Lots of cameras were flashing, and all I could think is that with my face in the king's armpit, pictures for posterity won't show who the kingchose to be his queen. I tipped away from David's armpit and then I gazed up at him romantically. This was a good pose for the pictures, but David feltso self-conscious about me gazing up at him that he looked off to the side instead of looking down at me. "I just thought of something. Maybe he was looking off to the side where Bonnie was sitting. By the way, remember Jimmy Eick, the kid who got us into the fairgrounds without paying? He was Bonnie's date to the prom and little does he know that Bonnie is in love with Peotter. And little does Bonnie know that Patsy has a huge crush on Jimmy Eick." "Jitterbug Girl" details the maturing of Van Straten through her first date, to school events, to driving, to virtually every experience teens encounter in their trip from childhood to young adult. This is her story, but she grew up in such an ordinary way that it becomes every girl's story."

Dancing with The Jitterbug Girl

Reviewed by PJ PierceJust as I suspected. Donna Van Straten has taken me through the gamut of emotions in The Jitterbug Girl: Class of '55. And the same fluid readability of her first novel, The Littlest Big Kid, comes through again in this one.In this second installment, Van Straten regales the reader with hilarious slices of her teenage years during the early 1950's in Black Creek, Wisconsin. All the while the author slips in reflections of more serious truths hidden within the niceties of Wisconsin small-town society. Her first-person narrative, complete with the genuine teenage slang of that day, rings true, especially for any American who lived through that innocent decade. The author says she discovered her first-person style while writing The Littlest Big Kid. After first attempting to tell her story from an adult perspective, Van Straten says (in an interview) that the kid inside her started telling HER version of the stories. "I decided to let her take over, telling things with her words and from her perspective. The advantage of telling things as if I'm still a kid is that it gets the analytical and inhibited side of my adult personality out of the way."From her teenage point of view, Van Straten reflects on the world as she is experiencing it. She relays her thoughts to me, the omnipresent reader, as if we are conversing. "I'm beginning to think that women run the world," 16-year-old Donna tells me after getting her first real job. "It doesn't seem like they do, but it's still true. For instance, I tell Marie Wagner and Edna Eick that I can make life easier for them by working in the grocery store, so they tell Babe to hire me. Babe had told me that he didn't need me, but after they talk to him, he calls to say that I can start work tomorrow. See what I mean? We may not get the credit, but we actually do run the world. It's because we figure things out faster than men."Babe allows his new hireling to give cookies to the Black Creek kids who come in the store with their parents, but not to the ragged and transient gypsy kids. "I want to fight for (the gypsy kids') rights, but I can't figure a way to do it," she tells me. "All day long I think about how it isn't fair that these poor kids can't have a cookie like every other kid in town. It's not their fault that they're gypsies, is it?"Throughout her childhood and teenage years, the author finds herself analyzing ethical situations such as how to tread the thin line between her boss and the gypsy children. And she continues to question the teachings of her Catholic religion. When the polio epidemic causes the Seymour Fair to be cancelled for fear of spreading germs, Donna and all of her six siblings have to begin taking a daily "polio" nap. Afraid of impending boredom, the 15-year-old decides to read the whole Bible to wile away the time in bed. "Catholics don't have to (read the Bible), but I'm going to,' she explains to me, the reader. "I want to try making sense