JUDY BLUME

Yes, she’s there.

From Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) through a string of novels featuring both children and adolescent characters, Judy Blume has made personal development and social conflict the core of her work. This biography by Oppenheimer—a scholar and author, most recently of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood—traces Blume’s literary development, from her childhood in a secular Jewish home in New Jersey, through marriages, children, divorce, and remarriage, to her aspirations to be the next Dr. Seuss. The book paints a picture of a diligent, driven writer seeking a unique voice. We get a year-by-year (at times, almost day-by-day) chronicle of Blume’s balancing of home life and motherhood with imaginative writing. We get insights into the publishing process, too, through the correspondence she had with editors and publishers and through the many reviews of her books. Blume changed young people’s literature. Oppenheimer writes, “As libraries, booksellers, and classrooms accepted the new realism of the YA literature—so good for generating bookstore profits, so successful at getting children to read in school and check books out of the library—they were primed to welcome the same kind of realism for even younger readers.” Blume’s books often met with criticism from parents and librarians who wanted safer stuff. But we see little of this conflict in this relentlessly upbeat biography. Blume emerges as a hard-working, ambitious, successful writer. Each book was welcomed by her readers. “She was shooting arrows to their hearts, again and again,” Oppenheimer writes. Her books taught generations to love to read. More importantly, they taught generations of young people to love themselves.

A buoyant biography of a writer who redefined young people’s literature.