Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! -- M. E. Kerr

I'm going to make my sister proud:  Due to reading this book, I might go on a huge M. E. Kerr kick.

I really loved it--you know how certain 70s movies have that feel?  That certain something that even without the hair and the clothes and the music that would tell you that the movie was filmed in the 70s?  That what this book was like:

Jingle explained Help Yourself to P. John, and P. John nodded his head in that old wiser-than-all-the-world way and said, "You'll probably attract a lot of radicals."

"Just what does that mean?"  Tucker's father looked up from a carton of Wheat Germ Old Caps with a cranky frown on his forehead.  His new business venture had done nothing to improve his mood.  He was beginning to take all the health-food literature very seriously.  He had cut out coffee, substituting papaya-mint tea, so that breakfast with him was like eating next to someone with all the symptoms on the side of a Compoz box.

P. John answered, "It's just that a lot of radicals are health nuts and vegetarians.  Hitler was.  George Bernard Shaw was.  Hitler's the exception, though.  Most of them are weak-sister socialists like Shaw."

"I suppose you prefer Hitler?"  Tucker's father said.

"To Shaw?  Certainly.  I don't agree with him all the way down the line, but he didn't cozy up to the Communists like a lot of jelly-spined liberals."

Dinky Hocker is a Fat Girl surrounded by a Perfect Liberal Family.  She becomes friends with, and begins dating, P. John, the Conservative Son of an Aging Hippie.  Things go from there.  Fab.  I already want to read it again.