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Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw was published in 1968.
I discovered it nearly 30 years ago - 29 years ago this month, actually - near the end of my sophomore year at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. It was obvious that I wouldn't be able to return the following year for financial reasons and I was heart-broken. I didn't want to leave Holland but I felt I had to. (That wasn't due to parental pressure or any reason at all other than some really screwed up counseling by supposedly well-meaning people at my church.) So I was finishing up the year, dreading the return to Indiana, and basically so depressed I should've been on meds for the next year but back then no one paid attention to depression or even really noticed it unless you actually killed yourself.
One day I found Greensleeves at the public library and fell in love with it. I read it instead of doing schoolwork - I read a lot of novels instead of doing schoolwork, though fortunately it didn't hurt too much. I loved it so much, I borrowed it over and over again everywhere I lived for years after, often through Interlibrary Loan. I wrote to the publisher, asking them to please consider reissuing it. Once I even left a letter in the ILL book, begging the librarian to let me know if they ever withdrew it so I could buy it from them. Eventually, I got a copy of my own and it's rarely left my sight. When we moved from Las Vegas back to Indiana, it was one of a handful of books I didn't leave in storage.
Greensleeves is about Shannon Kathleen Lightley, who is 18, just graduated from high school, and has no idea what to do with her life. Her divorced parents are famous and she's been raised all over Europe and in the Pacific Northwest. She feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere and doesn't really know who she is. The novel takes place over the summer following her graduation. She'd come back to Oregon to attend high school, thinking she'd fit in better there than in Europe, but the entire experience had been a disaster. Now she was headed back to Europe with no plan in mind. At the last minute, she doesn't board the plane. She goes to a friend of her father's - a man she calls Uncle Frosty, who is a lawyer - with nothing but whatever items she'd blindly shoved into her carry-on when she packed. With his help, she ends up moving into a room in a boarding house to help Uncle Frosty until the detective he wants to hire is available. (A deceased client had written a will that her daughter was now contesting. All the beneficiaries lived in the same neighborhood, two of them in the boardinghouse.) Shannon was meant to spend a couple of weeks being unobtrusive, basically keeping the room from being rented until the detective could step in. Instead, she invented a new persona, got a job as a waitress at a neighborhood diner, and informed Uncle Frosty that she was going to do the detecting herself.
At the end of the book, Shannon still doesn't have all the answers she was looking for but she's got some direction and some goals. Greensleeves doesn't have what I'd call a happy ending, but it has a very satisfying one. It's easy to see why I loved the book so much the first time I read it. It continues to hold up on rereading and it's still one of my favorites, all these years later.
(Edited to change dates a little so as not to age myself an entire year.)
Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw was published in 1968.
I discovered it nearly 30 years ago - 29 years ago this month, actually - near the end of my sophomore year at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. It was obvious that I wouldn't be able to return the following year for financial reasons and I was heart-broken. I didn't want to leave Holland but I felt I had to. (That wasn't due to parental pressure or any reason at all other than some really screwed up counseling by supposedly well-meaning people at my church.) So I was finishing up the year, dreading the return to Indiana, and basically so depressed I should've been on meds for the next year but back then no one paid attention to depression or even really noticed it unless you actually killed yourself.
One day I found Greensleeves at the public library and fell in love with it. I read it instead of doing schoolwork - I read a lot of novels instead of doing schoolwork, though fortunately it didn't hurt too much. I loved it so much, I borrowed it over and over again everywhere I lived for years after, often through Interlibrary Loan. I wrote to the publisher, asking them to please consider reissuing it. Once I even left a letter in the ILL book, begging the librarian to let me know if they ever withdrew it so I could buy it from them. Eventually, I got a copy of my own and it's rarely left my sight. When we moved from Las Vegas back to Indiana, it was one of a handful of books I didn't leave in storage.
Greensleeves is about Shannon Kathleen Lightley, who is 18, just graduated from high school, and has no idea what to do with her life. Her divorced parents are famous and she's been raised all over Europe and in the Pacific Northwest. She feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere and doesn't really know who she is. The novel takes place over the summer following her graduation. She'd come back to Oregon to attend high school, thinking she'd fit in better there than in Europe, but the entire experience had been a disaster. Now she was headed back to Europe with no plan in mind. At the last minute, she doesn't board the plane. She goes to a friend of her father's - a man she calls Uncle Frosty, who is a lawyer - with nothing but whatever items she'd blindly shoved into her carry-on when she packed. With his help, she ends up moving into a room in a boarding house to help Uncle Frosty until the detective he wants to hire is available. (A deceased client had written a will that her daughter was now contesting. All the beneficiaries lived in the same neighborhood, two of them in the boardinghouse.) Shannon was meant to spend a couple of weeks being unobtrusive, basically keeping the room from being rented until the detective could step in. Instead, she invented a new persona, got a job as a waitress at a neighborhood diner, and informed Uncle Frosty that she was going to do the detecting herself.
At the end of the book, Shannon still doesn't have all the answers she was looking for but she's got some direction and some goals. Greensleeves doesn't have what I'd call a happy ending, but it has a very satisfying one. It's easy to see why I loved the book so much the first time I read it. It continues to hold up on rereading and it's still one of my favorites, all these years later.
(Edited to change dates a little so as not to age myself an entire year.)
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