Or a lot of times the date is really not clear. Cress Delahanty is another realistic book, from whose introduction I got the phrase "girls who love books about girls who love books." I read it sometime after 2000, based on my memory of which library I checked it out of, but I blithely assumed that Cress was my own age. Teenaged in the 1980s, or maybe a little older. (She didn't watch TV, but her family lived way out in the country where there wouldn't have been TV reception anyway.) I was really a bit shocked to discover she was older than my parents. Would have been older. She seems so real.