The book you've been waiting for is here! Orders for A Born Maniac, or Puddles's Progress are shipping daily, and you can order a copy in the Bookshop. There are new features on this page, including the panel below where a click on a book title leads to more information. Below the panel is Ruth's newest article, notice of a new Ruth's Neighborhood entry, and more.
Snowy touches some chord in me. She's as real as anyone I've ever known.
—Jennifer, a fan from Massachusetts
With the addition of A Born Maniac, or Puddles's Progress, readers may continue to enjoy Snowy, Bev, Puddles, and the rest of the Gang. Each title is a complete story in itself, but most fans of the series would suggest beginning with the first volume, The Cheerleader. Click the panel menu bar, above, to learn more about each volume. Titles are listed in order.
In 1998, on the 25th anniversary of the publication of this national best-seller, The Cheerleader was rereleased as a trade paperback. This rereleased version is now in its fourth printing.
Searchingly honest, achingly real, The Cheerleader recalls all the joy, excitement, and pain of crossing the bridge from childhood to young womanhood in the Fabulous Fifties, when sex was still a mystery and goals were clearly defined--perhaps for the last time.
The Detroit Free Press said, "One of the truest portraits of an American girl ever written . . . Everything works in MacDougall's book. She captures the times, the attitudes, the emotions with the authority of one who was once there and knows the route back by heart."
The second, third and fourth printings of this rereleased version include a foreword by Ann V. Norton of St. Anselm College.
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Returning Soon: Trivia Quizzes
What happens when ex-cheerleaders grow up?
For Snowy, the cute, blond, ponytailed cheerleader at Gunthwaite High School in the 1950s, did anything ever match the glory of those days?
This is the story that the multitudes of fans of the best-selling The Cheerleader have clamored for, a story that new readers will respond to with equal eagerness. While chronicling Snowy’s next thirty years, it explores the complexities of friendship as it follows the lives of her best friends, beautiful Bev and outspoken Puddles, and her first love, Tom.
What happens when the Silent Generation grows up?
Snowy describes how Snowy and her friends, who came of age in the security of the 1950s when roles were defined and accepted, develop in the next decades, coping with college, marriage, and careers, their experiences unique and universal.
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"Our generation," Snowy says in Henrietta Snow, "is 'the disappeared'. We've dropped out of sight between our parents' generation—The Greatest Generation—and the baby boomers. Remember how we were called 'The Silent Generation'? Nobody knows about us."
But you will know!
Here are Snowy and Bev and Puddles, Tom, Dudley, the twins and all the Gang from Gunthwaite High School, in the next stage of their lives. How do they adjust to limitations, deal with grief, and face the realization that this is their last chance at love, success, and happiness? How do they face death?
With humor, for one thing. Like The Cheerleader and Snowy, Henrietta Snow is funny, honest, and indelible.
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* Bookshop courtesy of Frigate Books
Bev was tall, with short thick auburn hair. She looked older, more finished, than the other girls in their class. And she was green-eyed and beautiful, but she loved to make faces.
That was Bev Colby at age fifteen in The Cheerleader. Now, at sixty, her hair is white but she has remained a beauty and she still loves to make faces.
The co-captain of the basketball team, Roger was tall and coolly jaunty, a senior and so suave.
That was Roger Lambert, Bev’s boyfriend. After college Bev married Roger, they had four children and a comfortable life, but his problems with Bev’s desire for her own career in real estate resulted in a separation.
At the conclusion of Henrietta Snow, the third novel in The Snowy Series, Bev and Roger have decided to give their marriage another chance and to renew their vows.
“What happens next?” the readers always ask.
After the euphoria of the decision to get back together, Bev tries to face the reality of this prospect, while also trying to deal with her career and, even more important, a surprise with tremendous impact.
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Ruth Doan MacDougall writes, "Puddles has been on the back burner for so long, but she's clamoring for her turn. And, at long last, the fans who have been asking, (again!) 'What happens next?' will get at least part of the story."
Readers of earlier books in The Snowy Series may recall that originally Puddles came from Maine. Her family moved to Gunthwaite during her early teen years. Over the years Puddles has lived in several places, but her origins as "a born Maniac" haven't been forgotten.
What surprises are in store for readers as Puddles's life takes center stage?
In response to several queries from readers, Ruth shares some of ther thoughts about crafting Puddles's story. You'll find it right below this sliding panel, in the left columns, in "Ruth's Mailbox."
Scroll the text to read the entire article.
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* Bookshop courtesy of Frigate Books
When I gave Bev a book of her own (THE HUSBAND BENCH, or BEV'S BOOK), I knew that Puddles would want one too; in fact, I could hear her clamoring in my head. In that back-burner part of my brain, various titles stewed (Site Fidelity; A Gunthwaite Girl [from a song we used to sing about “When a Laconia girl walks down the street”]). Then suddenly I remembered Puddles saying in the Camden, Maine, scene in HENRIETTA SNOW, “I’m a born Maniac,” and I knew I had the title. Of course Puddles wanted an alliterating subtitle like Bev’s, and that suddenly arrived in my mind too, with Puddles recalling The Pilgrim’s Progress references in Little Women and reading excerpts from The Pilgrim’s Progress in senior English class.
I already knew that Puddles would be returning to Maine, a state that up to now hadn’t found its way into my novels as much as it has into my life.
When my sister, Penny, and I were children, we usually went to the ocean in New Hampshire, to a cottage our grandparents rented in Rye Harbor. But in her girlhood my mother had summered on Bustins Island in Maine and loved it, so a couple of summers our parents took us to Maine, unfamiliar to us and exotic. Down east from Ogunquit to Pemaquid Point we traveled, the latter making such an impression on us that decades later Penny came to live in that vicinity. During visits to Penny, I insist on driving past Ye Olde Forte Cabins, a cabin colony that doesn’t look much changed from when the Doan family stayed there.
When Don and I moved to Center Sandwich in 1976, we discovered that we couldn’t get New Hampshire TV channels anymore. Instead, we got Maine! During the ensuing years we’ve watched so much Maine news that we feel we really should vote in the Pine Tree State, not the Granite State. This became more Maine background for Puddles.
In the 1980s, Don and I began “collecting” Maine islands and continued to do so for the next fifteen years, from Matinicus to Isle au Haut. So I knew that when I took Puddles to Maine, she would go to an island. The one I invented, Quarry Island, is made up from all of the ones where Don and I have stayed.
As you’ll see in A BORN MANIAC’s “More about This Book” description on this site, there’s a castle in the book. It was inspired by a castle in New Hampshire’s Ossipee mountain range, nowadays named Castle in the Clouds and open to the public. When I was a kid, it was a private extravaganza known as “the Plant estate,” though by that time it was no longer owned by Thomas G. Plant, who had built it, but by the Tobey family. A daughter, Elizabeth Tobey Gonnerman, was married to my father’s college roommate. When the Gonnermans came up from Washington, D.C., for a visit there, we were invited. The place of course made a lasting impression on me, one that I exaggerated for the fictional castle.
About inspirations: When I began writing THE CHEERLEADER I started out with the simple idea of basing three main characters on me and my two closest friends. I was the only one of this triumivirate to become a cheerleader. In my original lineup of characters, I had Bev based on my best friend, Sally, and another non-cheering friend nicknamed Nutty, inspired by my dear friend Gail. Puddles was supposed to be just one of the cheerleaders. But then she spoke up on the first page, and I realized I had to change everything around and make Puddles the third member of the triumvirate, based on Gail, no matter that Gail hadn’t been a cheerleader and had actually left Laconia High School after her sophomore year for a private school in Massachusetts. Nutty became one of the class-ahead cheerleaders.
With the Bev-Sally character, Bev immediately developed into her own self, enhancing the plot by not being totally nice and wonderful like my Sally, and Puddles too took off from the Gail base. When I reread THE CHEERLEADER after a lapse of several years, I was startled to find that some of Puddles’s attitude reminded me of my mother, Ernie, who had a tendency to say the first thing that came into her head. Penny and I went in fear of what on earth Ernie would say when she opened her mouth, and we agree that it’s a wonder we ourselves can speak at all because we’re always checking what we’re going to say before we say it. Penny does admit that advancing age is bringing out more Ernie in her—and maybe that’s a good thing.
As for Puddles’s last name and nickname: When I was naming the characters, into my mind popped the nickname given to Larry Pond by his fraternity brothers at Williams. Larry is the husband of my dear friend from Bennington days, Gloria Dibble Pond. I loved this nickname, “Puddles,” and suddenly it seemed perfect for my purposes.
I’ve had a grand time with Puddles and her progress, and I hope you do too.
As her time permits, Ruth Doan MacDougall writes essays about life in and around her neighborhood. Topics vary, but something interesting is always going on in Ruth's Neighborhood!
Current Essay: "The Lot"
(October 14, 2011)
50 Hikes in the White Mountains
50 More Hikes in New Hampshire
Details & Purchase Information
Indian Stream Republic: Settling a New Frontier, 1785-1842
by Daniel Doan, edited by Ruth Doan MacDougall
Details & Purchase Information
This book, published in 2001, is available from Frigate Books only as a downloadable e-book (PDF); it can be read on any device that supports a PDF Reader (such as Adobe Reader), including computers, iPad, tablets, etc. A special book-reader application is not necessary.
Learn More
Purchasing Information
Many have asked about obtaining e-books of the five titles in The Snowy Series. Frigate Books says that this project is underway, but it's not a simple process. Ruth originally wrote the last three books in digital format so those are easy to convert, but the first two were written many years ago, when authors still used typewriters. Frigate Books and Ruth are working closely to digitize those two books, but since neither is willing to settle for quick scans of the pages (and if you've read older books that have been digitized by this process you know there are often many errors) the process will still take some months. Frigate wants to release the entire series at one time in e-book form.
