Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa in the eighties and nineties, we didn’t have tweens. Well, we did, but when I was what would now be called a tween was called pre-teen or young adult. I was in my final year of high school, the now defunct year of OAC, when tween had made it’s way to Barrhaven, too late to wrap me up in it’s silly sounding label.
But, when I was a tween, the list to take out scary books from the school library was a mile and a half long. R.L. Stine‘s were for our younger siblings. We went for Christopher Pike, with his mixture of teens having sex before gruesomely dying. But before those, we all read the same collection of scary stories, whose pictures were worse than the words themselves: Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.
Tesfa and I were at a book sale on Saturday and there I found and purchased for the sum of twenty five cents:
Excellent. Now Tesfa can be as traumatized as all of us were back in 1991. I didn’t let her look at it yet though. Possibly the pictures are a teensy bit too much for a five year old with as overactive an imagination as Tesfa has.