Judy Blume, one of America's most popular authors, is the recipient of the 2004 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of beloved books for young people, including Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (which celebrated fifty years in 2020), and novels for adult readers, including Wifey, Summer Sisters, and In the Unlikely Event. Her work has been translated into thirty-two languages. Visit Judy at judyblume.com or follow her on Twitter @JudyBlume. Find more of my reviews of books on TIME's Top 100 YA Books of All Time list here.
Margaret Simon likes long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain, and things that are pink. She's just moved from New York City to thee suburbs and is anxious to fit in with her new friends. They swear they'll tell each other everything—first bras, first kisses, first periods . . . everything. But some things are just too private to talk about, even with your friends, and especially when you're the new girl. Lucky for Margaret, she's got someone else to confide in . . . someone who always listens.
We dive right into Margaret's life by learning immediately about her move to New Jersey. We learn exactly how Margaret feels about this, and everything—and I really mean everything. Margaret doesn't spare us any detail about her first few days at her new school, what she thinks of her new classmates, and especially her thoughts about religion. The best part of these searing descriptions are when Margaret describes the peer pressure surrounding growing up. Margaret wants to get her period and become a woman, but a lot of that is influenced by conversations with her friends. The questions they share and the worries they have about "falling behind" put a voice behind the worries that so many pre-teen girls feel, and it's very powerful and validating to see that in print. And when you think about how Blume wrote this probably years and years after she'd had any of the same thoughts as Margaret, and how the book still resonates years and years after it was published, you can understand the gravity of how incredible this slim book truly is.
Margaret is also exploring her faith throughout the novel through a school project. Coming from an interfaith family, Margaret also feels pressured to please her family while also staying true to herself. She speaks to God daily, voicing her hopes and fears, but she isn't sure that she fits into any of the organized religion institutions in her new town. I love that the purpose of this part of the storyline is twofold: on the one hand, it's a very compassionate way to interpret faith when you're twelve years old—Margaret explores all of her options and speaks candidly about the function of religion and faith in her life—and on the other, it's an argument that no one can know what they truly want or who they truly are when they're twelve years old. This storyline helps capture that being a pre-teen is still part of one's youth, where mistakes are made and where someone is still figuring out who they are and who they want to be.
The book reads a little like a diary, if Margaret kept one, that's how close readers are to her inner thoughts. This has a lot of advantages, being what I talk about above. But the one drawback of this type of point of view is that it's very limited. Such as, we are constrained to only this one point in Margaret's life—we don't actually know what religion she chooses in the future, if any, or what boys she might end up kissing, or if she will end up hating her period like the rest of us do. Will she stop being friends with Nancy? And how will her relationship with her maternal grandparents evolve, if at all? Basically, there are so many unanswered questions, because Margaret only knows what she knows in that moment, in this period of her life. Which again, brings a lot of strength to the book. But for someone like me, reading is when they’re much older than the protagonist, I was left wanting to know how she felt about all the other aspects of growing up, too!
I can't wait to watch the movie version! Until then, you can find Judy Blume online at judyblume.com or follow her on Twitter @JudyBlume. Find more of my reviews of books on TIME's Top 100 YA Books of All Time list here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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