Shelf Discovery

Here’s the short version of Lizzie Skurnick and her sassy-and-smart new book Shelf Discovery: She’s a popular book critic and lit blogger who started a column called "Fine Lines" for Jezebel.com that made you feel like you and your girlfriends were huddled beneath a zip-up sleeping bag with a mini-flashlight reading between the lines of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and all the rest of your beloved, well-worn vintage young adult novels to unearth the subtext 30 years later.

The column became an instant hit and Skurnick’s newly released Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading is the book that collects all of Skurnick’s "book reports" with contributions from some YA novelists.

Page Turner chatted with Skurnick about how feminism bleeds through the pages of The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, why she’s actually the anti-nostalgia woman, how the YA novels really did make her a teenage feminist, and her mission to create a literary teen canon. Read on for more!