Toxic Love — Linda Holeman

Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Fiction Titles 2003

Toxic Love is a distinctive collection of short stories by Linda Holeman, each exploring love in all its touching, tragic, and often funny permutations.

In the title story “Toxic Love”, Carla is an intellectual with a stutter, a dweeb. She's also an incurable romantic. Feeling isolated in her country town, she tries to dream up romances for her English teacher, Miss Kleinfeld, and a handsome colleague. Carla is shocked from her giggly wishful daydreams when she realizes that Miss Kleinfeld's love was never available. In the hilarious “Something Fishy” the narrator is looking for some excitement in her ho-hum suburban life, and almost without meaning to, she tells a whopper of a lie. The excitement that follows is more than she bargained for.

First published in 1995 as Saying Good-bye, this brilliant collection of work by Linda Holeman navigates through the landscape of adolescence with sympathy and heart.