The Vine: December 1, 2025
Dear Sars,
I was surprised and delighted to learn that there’s new Vine material when I checked in recently for the annual 9/11 essay. Yay! I used to LIVE for Vine day. You have no idea. So, thing one: welcome back, Vine!
Years ago you answered a question of mine about a boy. You gave me good advice I finally followed two years later. I would like to say I learned my lesson and never settled again! I could make a whole country album about the stupid shit I did in pursuit of love.
Despite all that, I somehow find myself, at 51, happily married to the love of my life, childfree by choice and semi-retired in the country with a house full of cats. It’s been an odyssey! Thank you for the good advice, which I would like to believe rattled around in my head enough to prevent me from making even MORE bad choices than I did.
Anyway, I am looking for a book. It’s a YA book from probably the late ’70s or early ’80s. My copy was hardback and was lemon yellow with the title in a chunky black font that stood out on the shelf.
The main characters were girl/boy twins, Gabrielle and Adrian. I think Gabby was the first-person narrator. She wanted to be a writer and wrote for the school paper, including some snarky poems that were published anonymously. She was also working on a children’s story about sandhill cranes.
Adrian had a bedroom in the attic that he called the Aerie. Although it wasn’t dealt with explicitly, one got the vibe Adrian was probably somewhere on the spectrum — he was brilliant but weird and he took up a lot of space in the family and in Gabby’s head.
That’s all I’ve got, but I would be thrilled if someone could dredge up a title and author from that. I have generally decent Google kung-fu but have come up empty every time I’ve tried to find it.
Thanks!
Holly (the name I picked for my first Vine letter!)
Nice to see you again, Holly!
I hope the readers will have better luck with this one than I did; the only remotely helpful thing I could find is really more of a starting point that might prompt more info to bubble up for you, and it’s this list of YA books with yellow covers on Goodreads. Most of them look more recent than what we’d have read as kids, but maybe there’s something there?
Or maybe a reader will know exactly the book. Fingers crossed!
Tags: Ask The Readers books updates
I’d like to say I knew this book, but I’d never heard of it and had to cheat by using AI to find the answer. Gemini came up with “Gift of the Magi” by Jean Ferris, published in 1982 (it even provided the ISBN, which is 0395325121). I couldn’t find any links to it to verify the cover. I hope Holly can find this book somewhere!
I ran the ISBN and it says it’s…this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13722330-a-possible-life
Not that that’s not the book, but.
Alas, it isn’t either of these! But thank you.
To further complicate the quest, my book was a hardcover without the dust jacket, meaning the dust jacket could have had literally anything on it.
Also, because the book was thrifted and I recall having it in the mid-80s, it’s entirely possible it was written in the 70s or even the 60s.
ohhhhhhhh man, yeah that’s gonna complicate things. Yellow boards, got it.