Teenagers before the Word Was Used: Manuela Blayne and Trudy Cameron

Teenager is a modern word describing a type of person from the dawn of history.

Manuela Blayne is a new novella told by an eleven-year-old Caucasian girl about her impressions of her thirteen-year-old African American friend. The time is old, 1910, and yet the problems described are timeless--both old and modern. The narrator Trudy Cameron takes an intense look with her teenaged eyes at the legacy of hate in her world. 

Although teenagers weren't called by that name back then, they thought and acted as teenagers do today in some ways.

Have you ever googled the word teenager?

Here's what I found in Dictionary.com:

Word Origin and History for teenager

n. also teen ager, teen-ager ; derived noun from teenage (q.v.), 1922. The earlier word for this was teener, attested in American English from 1894,and teen had been used as a noun to mean  "teen-aged person" in 1818,though this was not common before 20c.

Manuela Blayne is free in Kindle form for a limited time.

Now, in the world of books, teenager is an obsolete term. Manuela Blayne is a young adult book.

Two Days . . .

I don't know what happened. When I placed Manuela Blayne on Amazon as a paper book, the pre-orders disappeared, but one person told me she had already received her copy.

Anyway, Manuela Blayne is available on Amazon.

In the simplest of words, I'm trying in this little novella, Manuela Blayne, to evoke some thought about how other people feel inside. For example, I'm trying to paint pictures of how it feels to be African-American and how it feels to be saturated in white people's prejudices in the early 1900's.

From Chapter Two:
Manuela's grandmother has just had a grand mal seizure. Papa Sam helps her walk back to the wagon. Trudy's little brother is shocked that Sam, a white man, is touching an African-American woman.

 Placing her foot in front of her as though she had to tell it what to do, she tried to walk. First she veered to the left and then to the right. Papa Sam and Herschel took her arms and led her.

Buddy, tugging at Billy’s shoulder, spoke too loud as usual.  “Do you see what Papa’s doing? Can you believe it?”