Deeply troubled youths struggle through the pages of Isabelle Holland's young adult novels….

Holland uses [her] material successfully to explore her characters' loneliness and need for love, but she seems to mistrust her adolescent reader's ability to face the disturbing consequences of the situations she creates. To prevent her novels from becoming terribly distressing, she resorts both to shallow psychologizing and plot manipulation to ameliorate her characters' problems. (p. 25)

A further problem in Holland's fiction lies in her attempt to impose her moral values on her adolescent readers. Her eagerness to condemn what she sees as the loss of traditional authority in child rearing, education, and religion often leads her to oversimplification and distortion of character and situation. We can be sure that in a novel of Holland's, a permissive adult will be weak and foolish, while a stern, generally conservative disciplinarian will be presented sympathetically…. Holland's preference...