Read This Place Has No Atmosphere Online
Authors: Paula Danziger
This Place Has No Atmosphere
1. Get married.
2. Get pregnant.
3. Pretend that I have amnesia and don’t recognize my parents anymore.
4. Hide out at the Monolith Mall until I’m of age.
5. Fall to the ground, grab my parents’ legs, and plead with them to change their minds.
6. Discuss in a logical grown-up way how I will hold my breath until my parents give in.
7. Promise not to ask for clothes for at least two years. (I better be more realistic and make it three months—or maybe one.)
8. Make believe I have shuttlephobia and will have a major freakout once the doors close.
9. Promise not to watch my television wristwatch until my homework is finished.
10. Get my grandparents to convince their children not to leave. (After all, if I have to listen to my parents, they should have to listen to theirs.)
11. Remind the parents that they aren’t the only ones involved in the move—that even though Starr, the creepling traitor, says that she likes the idea, she’s not the only kid in the family.
12. Beg.
13. Cry.
14. Faint.
15. Refuse to go.
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit
The Divorce Express
It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World
The Pistachio Prescription
There’s a Bat in Bunk Five
This Place Has No Atmosphere
PUFFIN BOOKS
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Originally published in 1986 by Delacorte Press
Published by PaperStar Books, 1999
Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006
This edition published by Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2014
Copyright © 1986 by Paula Danziger
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Ann M. Martin
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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PAPERSTAR EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Danziger, Paula.
This place has no atmosphere.
Summary: Aurora loves her life on Earth in the twenty-first century, until she learns that her family is moving to a colony on the moon.
ISBN 978-0-698-11695-5
[1. Moon—Fiction. 2. Moving, Household—Fiction. 3. Science Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D2394Ti [Fic]
85-46070
Puffin Books ISBN: 978-1-101-66585-5
Version_1
To Don and Ann Farber
Whose place does have atmosphere
And whom I love very much
Ways to Keep from Going to the Moon
Special Excerpt from
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit
The future has always interested me. What will it be like? How will it be different? How will it be the same? What will people be doing, thinking, wearing?
After writing several novels that were labeled “realistic fiction,” I decided to write “science fiction.” In some ways, this made me very nervous because I had not been a great science student. (An understatement!)
Research was necessary. Although I was setting the book on the moon, it was not possible to go there. So I visited Houston, saw the exhibits, and took a tour of the space shuttle simulator. I also went to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in one vehicle for so long. Then I remembered traveling for several days on a ferry boat that went from Seattle, Washington, to Sitka, Alaska. I adapted that experience and also used my imagination.
I really enjoyed creating a new world . . . and I hope that my past, present, and future readers will too.
—Paula Danziger
If a Prince Charming or a Prince Semi-Charming came up to my door and said, “Rosie Wilson, you are the most beautiful, individualistic fourteen-year-old in the universe,” I certainly wouldn’t slam the door in his face.
This is the first line of Paula Danziger’s hilarious and moving
It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World
. First lines fascinate me, and this one says a lot about Paula, her stories, and her characters. The author of over thirty titles for young adult readers, Paula was known for capturing her audience with her uncanny ability to tap into teenage psyches—to write realistically and unflinchingly about families, divorce, friendship, first love, insecurity, and injustice, and to do so with a wicked sense of humor. It’s rare for a reader to find herself laughing out loud, then just a few sentences later, searching for tissues in order to wipe away tears. Paula courted difficult, sometimes controversial subjects; her self-effacing characters and her love of humor made her books compelling reading.
Paula herself was as memorable as any character she created. She made friends wherever she went and was passionate about them. Somehow each of us felt as if we were Paula’s
best
friend. She was flamboyant and flashy. She tied colorful scarves around her head, wore as many oversize rings as possible on her fingers, and shopped with great joy for glittery sneakers and sequined purses. She liked video games and slot machines. She once managed to light one of her fake fingernails on fire. The first time I spent a weekend at her house, she offered me a breakfast of Coke, M&Ms, and Circus Peanuts.
Paula was a marvel of disorganization. I’ve never seen anything like the inside of her purse. It was a jumble of
loose bills and coins, receipts, lipstick cases, candy, lint, notebooks, keys. She frequently lost her keys, or thought she had, and a dramatic search would ensue before they were located, surprise, at the bottom of her purse. Her desk was worse, overflowing with larger items.
Yet out of this chaos sprang books that have resonated with readers for decades. Paula’s first book,
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit
, was published in 1974. Thirteen-year-old Marcy, the protagonist, may wear panty hose, buy records for her stereo, and never have heard of cell phones, but it doesn’t matter because she faces the same issues contemporary kids face:
All my life I’ve thought that I looked like a baby blimp with wire-frame glasses and mousy brown hair. Everyone always said that I’d grow out of it, but I was convinced that I’d become an adolescent blimp with wire-frame glasses, mousy brown hair, and acne.
Marcy’s story continues in
There’s a Bat in Bunk Five
when she experiences her first love while at summer camp:
This thing with Ted isn’t a crush. . . . What if I let myself start to care and get hurt? I’m not sure I can survive a broken heart. I get hurt so easily anyway, so I’ve never let myself get too close to a guy, not that there have been that many opportunities. I’m scared. What if it turns into a real relationship and it’s as bad as my parents’ marriage?
In
The Pistachio Prescription
Paula tackles divorce as Cassie Stephens’s family begins to crumble. In later books, other characters face the aftermath of divorce, but this story chronicles the Stephenses’ slide from dysfunctional, a theme Paula visits often, to separation. In a scene from the beginning of the book, Cassie visits her friend Vicki:
We sit down with her parents. Nobody fights at the Norton house. At least not while I’m there. Vicki says that they do
fight sometimes, but that it’s psychologically healthy to air feelings honestly. I don’t know if my family does it honestly, but if awards were given on the basis of yelling, we’d win the Mental Health Award of the century. I guess we’d probably be disqualified, though, on the basis of lack of sanity.
I smiled when I read that paragraph. But later the tone of the story changes:
[My father] walks over. “Cassie, I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I guess your mother’s right. There’s no use pretending we can get along. It’s over and that’s all there is to it.”
That’s all.
As simple as that.
Three kids.
A broken-up family.
Yet the ending is hopeful. Cassie realizes her family may not be the one she wishes for, but that she’ll survive.
Rearrange the letters in the word PARENTS and you get the word ENTRAPS
. This’s how
The Divorce Express
begins. Four years after the publication of
The Pistachio Prescription
Paula writes about Phoebe, who shuttles between her father’s home in Woodstock, New York, and her mother’s home in New York City. Travel is the least of Phoebe’s concerns, though. Now her parents are seeing other people:
Maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like to think about my parents having sex with anyone but each other
.
Phoebe analyzes the stages parents go through when they get divorced:
. . .
the fighting and anger—then the distance—and making me feel caught in the middle. After the divorce they try to be “civilized.” I know that there were even times that they missed each other. I know for a fact that after the divorce they even slept with each other once in a while. It was confusing. Now they act like people who have a past history together, but only a future of knowing each other because of me
.
By the end of
The Divorce Express
, Phoebe’s father has fallen in love with the mother of Rosie, Phoebe’s new best friend, and their story continues in
It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World
, told from Rosie’s point of view. All Rosie wants is a happy family, but Phoebe doesn’t make that easy. Furthermore, Rosie, who’s biracial, faces issues that Phoebe can’t fathom, and once again, Paula writes candidly about a sensitive subject, illustrated in this scene when Rosie goes on a date with a boy who’s white:
