While most fourteen year old girls are hanging out at the mall spending their hard-earned allowance on new clothes and quarters for an all-day marathon of Dance Dance Revolution at the video arcade, Portland-based author Zoe Trope was muddling through her freshman year of high school and composing a diary, which would later be turned into a much praised work of young adult literature, Please Don’t Kill the Freshman: A Memoir. In the opening pages of
the book, Trope displays her rare and witty teenage insight into the world of librarianship, insisting of the school media specialist, “You’re the one got stuck working in a high school library. No one chooses that profession, I’m sure.”