Paperback 1084: Almost April / Zoa Sherburne (Scholastic Book Services T -254)

 Paperback 1084: SBS T-254 (1st ptg, 1966)

Title: Almost April

Author: Zoa Sherburne

Cover artist: David Jonas

Condition: 7/10

Value: $8

[Riverow Books, Owego, NY, May 2024]

Best things about this cover: 

• After his girlfriend April died in a tragic sea serpent attack, Steve tried to make every girl he dated into a new April. With this latest one (Karen, aka April 4.0) he'd gotten close, but the chin ... the chin was wrong. He knew it, Karen knew it, the whole town knew it. Could Steve be content with ... Almost April?!
• He's pretty casual for a guy who still has the blood of the drifter he killed splattered all over him.
• She could use a little sun, but her outfit is impeccable. Her: windswept elegance. Him: Tony Perkins' stand-in.

Best things about this back cover: 

• Ooh, wraparound cover. Always exciting (to me), although that washed-up branch is pretty badly rendered. It looks like it's sprouting tentacles—which would, admittedly, instantly make this book 10x cooler. But they're insufficiently tentacley to create terror and so end up just looking stupid. The rest of the landscape looks fantastic.
• "Poor Dad" is about the last thing I expected to follow the sentence "Karen threw herself on the bed."
• "How can she make him understand about Nels?" How can you make *me* understand about Nels? Specifically, his name. Talk me through that.

Page 123~

Karen felt a little sick, reading the letter. She knew how her grandmother loathed television and how she clung to her old-fashioned monstrosity of a house. 

When Karen thought of how dreary her life would be there, with no "Gilligan's Island" and no "Hogan's Heroes" to keep her company, she panicked and ran to the beach to throw herself into the sea. Would Steve save her!? Or just watch like the jerk he obviously is?

~RP

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