In the mid eighties or thereabouts an author called Zibby Oneal wrote three near-perfect YA novels, The Language of Goldfish, A Formal Feeling and In Summer Light. Carrie Stokes (The Language of Goldfish ) is a sensitive, artistic thirteen-year-old in retreat from what others consider the ordinary steps in growing up – wearing a bra, attending junior dances, liking popular music with its explicit sexuality, awareness of adults’ sexual lives. She is not ready to take a teenager’s place in the affluent, hurried society in which she lives. She translates her fragmentation and longing into art – strange abstracts filled with motion and paintings of an imaginary island – and though she breaks down, by the end of the novel she is venturing on a tentative reconciliation with maturity, offering up the secrets and magic of her own childhood world – the language of goldfish – to a younger girl. The novel is a delicate, subtle critique of American society and its social and sexual pressures on the young.