It was 1991, and we were the 5th-grade girls in Mrs. Shaw’s 5th/6th-grade classroom. We were in a gifted and talented program, the kind of classrooms popular in the 1980s and 90s where the supposed best and brightest were corralled into a classroom and pushed in all things creative and academic. We were smart girls. We got good grades. We did our work.But I also think we had a bit of a reputation for things other than our academics. We wanted to know about boys and breasts that we didn’t have yet. We wanted to know about our periods and sex. And we were putting our advanced reading and research skills to work.

I’m sure we made a topic of discussion in the teacher’s lounge. Our teacher, Mrs. Shaw, who in retrospect had more patience and grace than we deserved at times, would frequently lecture us about our attitudes, our almost bullying (thank God we didn’t have access to phones and internet).  I remember one particular lecture about our reading choices, which she described as “frankly trash.” 

What was the trashiest book of all? The one that we all passed around? In fifth grade, it was Linda A. Cooney’s Freshman Dorm series. We wanted to know more–we had moved quickly through Judy Blume novels in 3rd and 4th grade (our teacher at that time removing Just as Long as We’re Together from her classroom library), and we had started to read 17, Teen, and YM. One girl’s older sister had a collection of all her old magazines and we’d spend hours at sleepovers going through them while Arsenio Hall played on the TV she had in her bedroom. We watched Brenda Walsh and Dylan McKay every Thursday night.  I don’t know if our thirst for knowledge of all things teenage, romance, and sex was fueled by just being tween girls or was somehow the effects of the edge of 1990s anti-establishment culture reaching our small Midwest town. But we were determined to learn everything about growing up, and surely this book, Freshman Dorm with its flashy cover and a character named Winnie who was described  on the back cover as “she’ll try anything once,” had some of those answers. 

So when our long-suffering teacher stood up and declared our reading choices “trash” of course, that didn’t make us suddenly consider Little Women or run to the library for Little House on the Prairie. We wanted more trash. 

And Linda A. Cooney could provide that. I always used to wonder if Linda A. Cooney was perhaps the more fun, more exciting writer sister of Caroline B.Cooney, Caroline being the prolific ya writer whose credits include The Face on the Milk Carton. In my internet searches 30 years later, it appears that Linda A. Cooney was likely a pen name for a group of writers who churned out young adult novels for Harper Collins. Multiple series, all of them probably deemed trash by my 5th-grade teacher, were published under the Linda A. Cooney name: Class of ‘88, Class of ‘89, Sunset High, Totally Hot, and the Samantha Crane series. 

When I saw the cover of this book in a used bookstore, the memory of my teacher calling the books trash flashed back and I decided to pick up book one in the series, Freshman Dorm, and decide if it indeed quantified. 

The introduction to the book quickly establishes its conflict: three high school best friends are all attending the fictional University of Springfield (I think the school is in Oregon? Pacific Northwest? There was an Oregon sweatshirt at some point, and it rains a lot in the book, but an actual location is never stated as far as I know). And guess what? These friends are all so different! Surprise. 

The book sets up their personalities with the dorms each girl has selected. Serious KC Angeletti, daughter of ex hippies who wants to be on Wall Street has chosen Langston House, an all-girls dorm with a 24-hour quiet rule for studying. Faith, the all-American blond girl whose longtime perfect boyfriend Brooks is also at Springfield, chooses Coleridge, the dorm for creative arts students, and Winnie, the wild child, after forgetting to mail in her dorm request, luckily finds a last-minute placement in Forest Hall, the co-ed party dorm. 

KC, Faith and Winnie navigate many first year of college experiences in this book, or at least what a tween girl might have thought was a typical first year of college experience. The entire novel is their first week of college. At Springfield, I guess the students move in for a week-long orientation. This kind of pushed my plot bs radar–40 something me honestly thinks that an entire week of no classes and living in dorms would have involved way more drinking and sex than what actually takes place in this book. 

Harper Collins and the writers behind the pen name Linda A. Cooney knew that actual college freshmen were not their target audience for Freshman Dorm.  Target audience was much younger girls, like us. And those tween girl readers weren’t there for a how-to of college but instead reading for a glimpse of life’s next chapter. For these girls, the book balances a good line of PG-13 trash, keeping the adventures a little scandalous, but not racy enough to get on a ban list at a school board meeting. 

It isn’t War and Peace. It isn’t even Little Women, as Mrs. Shaw would have likely preferred to see us reading. But what the Freshman Dorm series does succeed in is handling some mature topics in a way that didn’t necessarily talk down to a bunch of fifth grade girls wanting answers about sex, love … and a little bit of trash. 

The issue of date rape and drinking is handled delicately by Winnie’s subplot. Winnie’s mother is a psychologist who has talked to her daughter and her friends about sex and even made sure they were comfortable buying condoms (believe me–a very bold stance for 1990). At a dorm toga party, this cool girl Winnie is seen suddenly feeling insecure. This isn’t the small pond of her high school. This is college and she isn’t sure how she fits into this scene, or even if she does. She decides to drink some rum she is offered, ends up drinking a little too much and coming on to this boy she met earlier, Josh. They go back to Josh’s place, and the chapter ends with her feeling his body. And fade out. The next chapter starts with her waking up, seeing him asleep and not remembering a thing. This quickly could have gone very melodramatic-after-school special with Winnie having an unwanted pregnancy or an STD, a whole see-what-happens-to-bad-girls message, that so many of us in the early 1990s endured. But it turns out that Winnie just blacked out and slept, and Josh respected that. The only real consequence of her “bad” behavior is Winnie is left embarrassed and wondering if she ruined a chance at actually getting to know Josh, but that’s it. 

We also get a decent message about high school relationships in the seemingly perfect Faith and Brooks. They’re the couple that’s been together forever and comes to college together. In this very quick week, they are already seemingly drifting apart, and Faith is starting to wonder if this is who she is, just part of the couple, or if she needs to find out who she is. When I started reading this plot line, I immediately remembered how even when I was 11, I thought Brooks seemed like the most boring vanilla boyfriend ever and cheered on the inevitable breakup. Before they break up though, Faith decides that she should try to save the relationship by having sex with Brooks. He comes to her dorm room for the night …and it just doesn’t happen. Instead they break up. And it’s okay.  In the movies, the credits always roll after the high school girl gets the guy. Andie and Blaine. Sam and Jake Ryan. But those movies never show us the next chapter where life actually happens, the couple has to deal with change, and probably breaks up. We actually get that in Faith and Brooks and the world doesn’t end. It keeps going. And this is another message important to a pre-teen girl. You don’t have to stick with the guy just because you’re sort of supposed to. 

Our third plot line, that of KC who is looking to move up in the world by rushing Tri Beta house, does venture into the YA melodrama, complete with the dumping of a drink on the bully at the end. Even though this storyline was likely supposed to be a cautionary tale about bullying and classism, I remember it inspired one of my friends to say she wanted to be in a sorority one day. 

There is nothing about Freshman Dorm that’s particularly groundbreaking. The dialogue feels stiff and sanitized at times, the characters are fine, but not particularly complex. After all these years though, it was a quick and fun read, and I can see how this trashy book might have meant a lot to an 11-year-old girl who was growing up in a world where we had been told to fear AIDS and pregnancies, where we viewed the will-they-won’t-they of Brenda and Dylan, where Madonna’s Pepsi video had been banned, where we had so many questions, but very few answers from our mothers … and no internet to fill in the gaps. 

Mrs. Shaw might have been right. Freshman Dorm is not a Newbery Award winner. It doesn’t try to be. It might just be a little trashy. But when you’re an 11-year-old girl growing up in the middle of nowhere Michigan, these are the kind of novels you pass around with your friends, the kind of novels that help fill in the gaps between rumors and real life when all you want to do is grow up but growing up still seems so scary. As a mother to two daughters in 2026, I hope I can talk to my girls about growing up and life a little better than some of our boomer mothers did. And I also hope they and their friends find their own trashy novels too. 

That’s So ‘90s lines

• Description of one of the Tri Beta sorority sisters: “Stunning in a classic, Cybill Shepherd way, she wore a red plaid skirt, a little velvet jacket, a blouse with a lace jabot and patent-leather flats.” 
• Quote from Josh, Winnie’s would-be crush who is studying engineering: “Jerry, the RA here, has one of those NEXT computers. He said he’d let me experiment with it if I caught him before eleven.”