Pink Magic

(from dustjacket flap)

"The sixteenth year is the hardest, darling...You're neither fish nor fowl this year. So keep your mind on art."

But to Lambie Prowder, junior miss with eyeglasses and too frank a nature, Art is not enough to carry her through this summer trip to Mexico. She watches her companions Corney and Horty, each a rip seventeen, exercising their pink magic,* and comes quickly to the tragic conclusion that she will never learn. Yet her hilarious adventures, beginning with the loss of all her money and then of her glasses, net her in the end an honest big-as-life boy friend, while her glowing companions are still doing up their hair and their faces and casting out their lines for "Somebody New."

Miss Runbeck has brought her special humor-plus-wisdom to the teen-age situation. Her fans will be reminded of the light touch that characterized her first success, "Miss Boo". The element of satire, but gentle satire, has been added to a tender story. "Pink Magic" takes the sixteen-year-old daydream, makes it funny, and then makes it come true. All ages will like it: parents struggling with their daughters through the difficult years of adolescence will find her consolation, hope, and a fund of advice. Young readers will recognize a slice of their own particular cake; and anyone who has ever been a wallflower if only for one evening will go with Lambie through her tragi-comic agonies and enjoy her final triumph.
*Definition: allure; appeal; a spell cast over the Other Sex

It's hard to find much information about Margaret Lee Runbeck (1900-1956) online, or many recent reviews of her books (during her lifetime, she published 16, and more than 250 articles). She seems to have been most famous for Our Miss Boo -- a volume of short sketches about an especially cute four-year-old -- with two more books appearing in that series. In the early '50s, she was involved in the State Department's Point Four Program and the Committee on World Literacy, lived and studied in India, and wrote a number of short chapter books designed for older students learning to read. Most of her work seems to have been strongly religious (Christian), though Pink Magic is not (only a hint, towards the end, which sits oddly with the tone of the rest of the book).

Pink Magic is a fun read. It would take a hard heart or an unscathed adolescence not to empathize with Lambie: sixteen, and feeling the embodiment of awkward -- "cursed, unfeminine brain", big frame, and glasses. There's a lot of working through body issues, a brief crush on a glamorous young woman, an attempted makeover, a disastrous romantic misunderstanding, but, finally, the happy ending you so want for her: self-respect, a healthy relationship, AND showing up the glamor girls who dismissed her as"Baby Mountain". There are some very funny bits, and a few genuinely touching ones, too. The passage where the male mc tells Lambie how he finds her beautiful, in particular, is just lovely.

It's clear the book was written more for adults than teens: the word "sex" makes an appearance and our young protagonist judges everyone over 30 as hopelessly desiccated (a joke which gets, no pun intended, a little old). That's a small complaint: larger, is that it's set in Mexico, with the usual dismissiveness towards most of the native residents. Nothing out of the ordinary for the time, but diminishing some of the enjoyment.

The male lead is described, at one point, as a "womanhater". This is common in vintage books, but his character made me reflect that there are really two distinct types of "womanhating" males in these kinds of light novels. The first is what 70s and 80s female characters will describe as "chauvinistic pigs" -- dominant, assuming masculine superiority, and viewing women as fundamentally silly or cheating or manipulative or... The second is the quirky, what we might now recognize as neurodivergent, man, like you find here, who "hates" artifice and the way he feels women suppress their authentic personalities and hide their intelligence to win a man. The fact that it's societal power structures and lack of opportunity that forced women into these "dishonest" roles isn't explicitly elaborated -- here, or, to my knowledge, elsewhere -- but it's a different and more interesting take, nonetheless.