Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. The Banned Book Brigade Join 60 other followers. Sign me up. Both of my last books were written by Judy Blume.
I am sure many of you know who she is but here is some background information anyway. Judy Blume received her B. Blume has also received many awards and recognitions throughout her career. Michael and Katherine meet at a party and start a relationship after that. They become very close and responsibly intimate. Neither one of the teens is pressured into sex by the other, Michael carries condoms with him just in case, and Katherine decides to get The Pill. Blume essentially argues in her book that it is possible to have sex and not have your life ruined.
Blubber is book in which the narrator is a 5 th grade girl named Jill. Jill is basically telling her story of how there is a fat girl named Linda who lets everyone bully her, including Jill, but most of all Wendy who is the meanest girl and controls the whole class.
Throughout the book, Jill explains how she helps Wendy and their friends bully Linda, and thinks that she deserves it because she lets people walk all over her. Eventually the tables are turned and Linda befriends Wendy while she leads the class in bullying Jill. It is an incongruous revelation. Blume, 76, is the sort of author who is beloved by her fans, who stretch from the children of today to the adults who read her books when they were growing up, and were astonished at finding a novelist who spoke so clearly, so uncondescendingly, so directly, to their concerns, whether masturbation Deenie , periods and boobs Margaret , sex and birth control Forever… , or death Tiger Eyes.
Her books have sold 82m copies worldwide since The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo , her first book, was published in She has been given an award for lifetime achievement from the American Library Association , the Library of Congress living legends award and the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters.
But Blume is also the recipient of a more dubious accolade: she is one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century. Her books have drawn fire from parents ever since the 80s for their frank depiction of puberty and sexuality, from Deenie, the year-old who touches herself in "this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling", to Katherine and Michael, the teenagers who fall in love and have sex — ever so responsibly — in Forever ….
Children's reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don't have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don't do this, we don't ban books.
But then they did. Blume's theory is that children read over what they aren't yet ready to understand. Sometimes, she says, "kids will actually go to Mom or Dad and say 'What does this mean? But that's when sometimes parents get hysterical. It's like, 'Argh, I don't want to talk to you about this, let's get rid of this book, I don't ever want to talk to you about this, I don't ever want you to go through puberty.
Blume most famously tackles puberty is in Margaret , her story of a sixth grader who talks to God like a friend, worries about being the last to get her period, and longs for breasts. It's me, Margaret. I just did an exercise to help me grow. Have you thought about it, God? About my growing, I mean. I've got a bra now. It would be nice if I had something to put in it. I would plead, 'Just let me be normal', which meant let me have my period, give me some breasts, and hurry up You know, the 50s, the body image for women was round and curvy, and I was this skinny little thing, very small, and I wanted to be round and curvy the way round and curvy women today want to be skinny things.
I always had stories, they were always there inside my head. I never told anyone, but they were there. She trained as a teacher but never taught; she was married before she graduated from college.
My father had just died and the wedding was scheduled. I was 21, we got married and I did my final year at college. Then, before that ended, I was pregnant, and had two babies by the time I was 25, and then started to write. She'd make up rhyming stories when she was washing the dishes at night and added her own illustrations, sending them off to publishers. Then she decided she wanted to write novels, took a writing course, and out came Iggie's House , the story of Winnie, a girl whose quintessentially white surburban-American street gets its first black family, and who is confronted with — and confronts — racism.
I loved having little kids, I relate to little kids, but something was missing, and I don't think about this every day, but when I think about it, it's that creative energy.
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