Hangin' Out with Cici (also published under the title My Mother Was Never a Kid), is a rather obscure 1977 young adult novel by Francine Pascal, best known as the creator of the Sweet Valley High book series. It was adapted into an ABC Afterschool Special, under the aforementioned alternate title, in 1981.
The premise is that protagonist Victoria Martin, a teenage delinquent whose mother has given up trying to control her, is sent back in time to The '40s, where she meets her mom as a teenager, who acts much the same as she does, back in 1977.
The novel received two sequels, My First Love & Other Disasters (1979) and Love & Betrayal & Hold the Mayo! (1985). They scrapped the unique Time Travel story of the original for generic romance plots, and are even more obscure than the original, which is really saying something.
This novel contains examples of:
- All Just a Dream: Averted; both Victoria and Cici remember their weekend together, and Cici actually uses her knowledge of an event that happened then to blackmail the principal into not expelling Victoria. (Yes, her mother remembers meeting her own daughter before Victoria was even born. Try wrapping your brain around that.)
- Big Applesauce: Where the novel takes place, in both 1977 and 1944. It makes good use of it too, pointing out the differences between the decades (comparing the old Penn Station and the new one, for example).
- Character Development: Victoria has matured and grown out of her delinquency by the novel's end. Her mom is closer to her now, too.
- Delinquent: Victoria is a classic one - she incites riots, swears up a storm (but not any of the really bad words; this is a Seventies teen book, after all), and smokes pot.
- Drugs Are Bad: Victoria's casual pot smoking is treated as a character flaw for her to overcome.
- The '40s: The decade Victoria to which travels back in time.
- Generation Xerox: Victoria's mother acts exactly as she does as a teenager.
- Inflation Negation: Victoria gets a pretty good meal for a dime once she ends up in The '40s.
- Poor Man's Porn: Near the middle of the book, Cici tells Victoria she knows how to get Tropic of Cancer. The book was un-banned by Victoria's time, so she's not impressed.
- Shown Their Work: There are a surprising amount of period references, from Kilroy Was Here graffiti being everywhere, to Cici collecting tin foil scraps from cigarette packs for the War Effort, and so on.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Victoria is a Rare Female Example. She doesn't say the strongest profanity like ''fuck'' and ''cunt'', though.
- Time Travel: Rather unusually for a teen novel from The '70s.
