Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume

by Jennifer O'Connell, Meg Cabot, Beth Kendrick

"I wonder if Judy Blume really knows how many girls' lives she affected. I wonder if she knows that at least one of her books made a grown woman finally feel like she'd been a normal girl all along..."
—from Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume

Whether laughing to tears reading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great or clamoring for more unmistakable "me too!" moments in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret , girls all over the world have been touched by Judy Blume's poignant coming-of-age stories. Now, in this anthology of essays, twenty-four notable female authors write straight from the heart about the unforgettable novels that left an indelible mark on their childhoods and still influence them today. After growing up from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing into Smart Women , these writers pay tribute, through their reflections and most cherished memories, to one of the most beloved authors of all time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Chick Lit, Books About Books, Short Stories, Memoir, Anthologies

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 2007

About the author

Published teen fiction under the name Jenny O'Connell.

Although she's written about a reality dating show, a prescient pastry chef, and a woman who inspired an 80's rock hit, Jennifer has not spent hours dissecting The Bachelor, she can barely follow the directions on the back of a Betty Crocker box, and she can only dream of a long-haired, guitar-thrashing rocker even giving her a second glance.

While she cringes at the thought of being called Jenny again after all these years, her first teen book PLAN B, was published under Jenny O'Connell by MTV Books (March 2006). Jenny's second teen book, THE BOOK OF LUKE, arrived in April 2007, and her Martha’s Vineyard Novels, LOCAL GIRLS and RICH BOYS, were published in June 2008.

Her days as a high school senior may be long behind her, but Jennifer did receive her B.A. from Smith College and her M.B.A. from the University of Chicago.

You can e-mail Jennifer at jennifer@jenniferoconnell.com.

Reviews

[MaryAnn Harlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It brings back so many memories of Judy Blume books, and that time period where every girl I knew read Judy Blume - we tried increasing our bust size like Margaret, and shared the pages in Forever (you know the pages), we all knew Judy Blume characters, they were the books of our childhood, and early adolescence.

It also brought me back to why I am a reader, what I find in the pages of a book and what I look for. I am a lit major - I spent a lot of years deconstructing and analyzing words and stories. I am a big believer in reader response - that a story does not exist in a vacuum, it is only understood through the lens of the reader and so everyone has a slightly different experience with a book. And yet author intent, if it is successful, allows us to share experiences, to move reading from a solitary past time to a shared social experience.

For my generation Judy Blume is a cultural touchstone, and sentimental me, found myself tearing up reading essays that reminded me of that touchstone. I swear if I didn’t know better I would think people I knew were writing these essays. What am I saying? People I know wrote these essays, we just haven’t actually met.

[Manybooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

Now I have always simply adored Judy Blume as an author and therefore, I was very much looking forward to reading this here compilation of "Judy Blume" themed essays. However and sadly, I have indeed found Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume pretty well massively and utterly disappointing and not really at all what I was in fact looking for. For while I had fondly expected and hoped that Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume would be first and foremost a celebration of Blume's oeuvre as a whole, as well as a literary analysis of the same, most of the featured articles except for perhaps Beth Kendrick's The Mother of All Balancing Acts are truly more or less nothing more than autobiographical snippets, which might indeed be interesting if I were actually looking for personal memoirs and desiring this, but which I most certainly was NOT.

And yes, much sadly, the vast majority of the presented essays of Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume have therefore proven very much personally frustrating and annoying, as Judy Blume's fiction is to and for me generally and for the most part simply used as a plot device to move the diverse authors' memories of their childhoods and teenager-hoods along, with not really ever any in-depth literary analysis and interpretations of Judy Blume's actual novels, of her own printed words and themes (and therefore, from a personal reading pleasure and academic expectation point of view I can and will only consider a one star ranking at best for Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume, but with the necessary caveat that this is indeed my own and personal opinion and that other readers might well consider the shown and featured biographical essays their proverbial cup of sweetly satisfying tea).

[Stephanie Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me laugh harder than I have in a long time! From start to finish I felt like I was a member of special club of girlfriends. We all grew up in the seventies, watched (or were forbidden to watch) the same t.v. programs. I kept thinking, “Me! That was me back then!” And the author Judy Blume was the rockstar of kid lit at that time. Like the other members of this club, I first encountered her writing through reading “Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing” and “Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great.”( I felt as though Sheila and I would have really hit it off, because we both dreaded and despised swimming lessons that were forced upon us.)
Graduating to “Blubber” and “Starring Sally J.”, I learned things about mean girls, and got a first-time education about the Jewish concentration camps of WW2. Being rather “flat” even into 7th grade, I sympathized with good old anxious Margaret, but then wondered what was so great about starting your period, because I hated it! The dive into the deep end of the pool was reading “Tiger Eyes” and “Deenie”, however. Both books contained topics that a child raised in the Bible Belt like myself would never have dreamed of discussing with adults, so they were checked out and read on the sly.
Like all the contributing authors in this book, I can look back and see how the writings of Blume were relevant and helpful to me through different stages of growing up. I think these books will be around and be treasured by many generations of young ladies who just need a friend that “gets” them and understands the roller-coaster ride that becoming a woman can be.
All Hail to the members of this club!

[Kendra · Rating 2 out of 5]

You have no idea how much I wanted to like this book. I was a huge Judy Blume fan as a kid, so I figured that a tribute to her had to be pretty good as well. Nope. Perhaps if the 20-some contributing writers had each written something unique, the book would have been tolerable, but it's nothing but "Just like Sally J. Freedman, I..." and "Like Margaret, I..." through the whole damn thing. And, if I counted correctly, the plots of Deenie and Forever... were re-hashed 6,000 times. There were one or two gems among the essays, but for the most part, this book felt like assigned reading rather than pleasure reading.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

While occasionally offering something genuinely touching or amusing or what-have-you, this collection of essays by current girl-teen and chick-lit authors on their connections with various Blume characters served mainly to remind me that Anything You Should Need To Know About Your Girlhood Can Supposedly Be Learned from Judy Blume. There’s a recurring mantra in these books that I remember reading on their covers years ago, the idea that they reflect the secret identity of every girl. Here you can discover someone Just Like You, find answers to some of your most distressing questions, and take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. Except, of course, if you happen to be The One Girl in the World who isn’t Margaret. (For example.) For me, as for any other non-Margarets, these same books – books that communicated to several hundred thousand girls that they were not alone – bore a singular message that I was and always would be a freak. For me as for them, reading Judy Blume (post-Fudge, I mean) was proof positive that whatever I was, I wasn’t a girl. A claim that these books could teach “all we needed to know about being girls” must implicitly define “girl” with a seriously heteronormative slant, as a healthy non-hetero-sexuality constitutes a significant barrier between a reader and any of Judy’s girls. (That said, having read such a compelling recommendation of her in this collection, I like to believe JB would have further expanded her plot lines to meet the needs of her young audience, had the need occurred to her. But given that she didn’t...) This commentary, like the books it discusses, fails to be as all-appealing as it intends. Ultimately, although I was occasionally hopeful as an essay began (Megan Crane’s piece on what it’s like to break up with your best friend struck a few chords and alluded to the Veronica Mars theme, which won it bonus points; Linda Curnyn excited actual finger-crossing when she reframed her first best-friendships as “crushes”), they all pounded back an old theme: Such books as make us happy, we could, if need be, write ourselves. And need be. If you want a book about what it’s like to read Judy Blume as an asexual, a sexphobic, or a burgeoning lesbian, you’re going to have to write it yourself. [Note to the publisher: Perhaps a companion collection along the lines of "Letter to My Grade-School Librarian: Where Did You Put the Nancy Garden"?]

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book in that it took me down a pleasurable trip down memory lane. If you're American and a girl, most likely you will have read at least one Judy Blume book in your formative years. Blume books are a coming of age guide for tween girls. And a few of the writers' stories, I thought were interesting.

What I didn't like about this book is how poorly written most of these stories were. You could definitely tell what genre they wrote and not at the top of their genre either. Other than Meg Cabot, I didn't know any of these women as writers and it will most likely stay that way.

But that aside, what I also realized was how differently Judy Blume affected me. I enjoyed Blume's writing. I found certain situations similar to mine but none in a life changing way. Maybe it was because I was adopted and Asian and so these girls always felt a little outside my norm. But mostly, I had happily married parents. My school valued intelligence so being smart was a virtue like being pretty. My classmates would compete at who was the "smartest" and while there was probably one girl who could have possibly won the "prettiest" title, we all generally got along with each other. It was a private parochial school run by my church and none of my classmates (kindergarten through 8th grade) ever had a crisis of religion or religious identity. The core group in my class knew each other from kindergarten and so we has a sense of safety and security with each other that comes with familiarity. So all these women's stories didn't make me think "oh yeah! That's how my childhood was." And I think I missed that part of this reading experience.

Also, there were a LOT of stories and not as many Judy Blume books so there were a LOT of repeat tales. And while each person was unique, what they gained from the book was pretty much the same. And by the end it felt less like a reminiscing session of female bonding but an after school lesson for a YA reader.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

For all those Judy Bloom fans out there - boy does this book bring back some memories and make you want to crack open those old volumes and see what insight you can get from them now that you are past awkward adolescence. (Indeed, some of the contributors speak to this very thing.) However, after a awhile the essays got a little old. They seemed to say the same thing and focus on the same Judy Bloom books and/or characters (I lost count of how many times "Forever" was referenced). On one hand this speaks to the relevance of these characters and how they really spoke to people...on the other hand, for me, it made a bit of a tedious read. One essay mentioning Margaret and her breast issues read the same as another....

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are moments where this book slips. That's no surprise, what with the fact that it's a collection of essays from so many different female writers. Some essays get boring, a few come with that unpleasant realization that you don't like the person writing them. But they're all pretty interesting in that they show how important Judy Blume books were for women who were teenagers in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I work with teen readers at a library. I don't see them hustling to pick up Forever...I think Gossip Girl and The Luxe series has kind of supplanted JB's particular variety of advice and exposure. Maybe that's something that we'll just have to live with -- modern girls won't be the sort who sneak around copies of Judy Blume's racier stuff, or their mom's copy of Clan of the Cave Bear (or whatever that goofy ass Jean M. Auel novel is called), or even Flowers in the Attic, which to this day is one of the most disturbing books I've ever come across. They know more than we did about sex acts. But when it comes to figuring out how we feel about that stuff, I think teenagers then and now and before are the same -- it takes some navigating.

That's where JB comes in. These essays are so cool because they sort of validate how much of our thinking about growing up and sex and friendship came from her books. Nobody was saying quite the way she was. And she's still a very powerful voice.

I think the best essay in the book is actually one in which one writer talks about how the books have evolved for her. When she was a kid, she identified with the kids of the book. Now that she's an adult, she sees how fleshed out and real the mother characters are. And she said that she thinks that were she to read the books as a grandmother, she would probably identify with those characters. So, yeah. Not every essay in this book will knock you out. But some of them will. The main thing that pops out is the power of those characters and situations and how we felt about it all when we first read it, and how those feelings sneakily inform parts of our characters. Who else does as universally as JB?

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 As a middle-aged white, American woman in 2020, I obviously grew up on Judy Blume books. I am the target audience for this collection. But it is so repetitive, and honestly, Forever was a WAYYY bigger deal to most of these women than to me. Look, Judy Blume was groundbreaking. She wrote things for children and young adults that nobody else was writing. And she made them feel like the big deal that they were to the person involved, while also simultaneously somehow depicting that in the scheme of things, they really weren't a big deal. I think that's what bugged me about some of these essays. They get the big deal to them part, but they don't realize that these are not universal issues unless you grew up in a very specific way in a specific time and a specific place - a girl or young teen in the United States in the 1970s or 80s, white and middle class, who read a lot and didn't always fit in.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading twenty-three mediocre (IMO) essays by other female writers (I liked Meg Cabot's essay), I've come to the conclusion that I never felt a connection with Judy Blume's character because I had a fairly normal, non-dyfunctional childhood and adolesence.

- My parents are still married to each other.
- I didn't/don't have any conflicting feelings about religion.
- My mom took the time to explain to me that some day I would start menstruating and what that meant.
- Although I was "the new kid" in school a few times, I made friends fairly easily.
- I wasn't ever bullied.
- I never thought sex was bad or dirty. Instead I was taught it was something special and best left until I was in a committed, monogamous and married relationship.

Now, I'm not saying that you needed to have a dysfunctional childhood to enjoy and connect with Judy Blume's books, but I think it helps. The overlying theme of the essays was "I felt I was the only one dealing with my parent's divorce/my changing body/raging hormones/the bully at school/etc, and Judy Blume showed me I wasn't."

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The point -- that Judy Blume reflects universal experiences (as long as you're white and middle-class, which is the unspoken part of the point) that nonetheless tended to strike readers as personal revelations -- is well-taken, but also makes these essays, by and large, pretty unreadable. No one has anything interesting to say, and how could they, when the task at hand is to create variations on the theme "why my girlhood was a normal American girlhood and therefore Judy TOTALLY GOT ME." I'm as skeptical of (and, ahem, mesmerized by) the "my childhood was uniquely, epically awful" genre as the next girl, but turns out there's a reason there's no market for "my childhood, including my dad, was nice, if periodically minorly traumatic in lovely coming-of-age ways suitable for swelling music a la Full House." The only thing remaining? Explain the market for Full House.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you were into Blume's books at least somewhat, you would enjoy this collection of assays by modern and young female authors describing ways in which their lives were touched by her writings. Typically I am not into collections; I like a good involved story, not a bunch of shorties. But this was the exception. While some of the essays were take or leave it, a good 80% offered much insight into youth and the transition into adulthood and expectations and of course how this tremendous author was able to communicate so effectively at the various stages of people's lives.

[Cynthia (Bingeing On Books) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Judy Blume as a child and I have read just about all of her books. This book filled me with nostalgia for the books I did read and made me want to read the books of hers that I hadn't gotten to yet. There were lots of stories about lessons that these authors had learned from Judy Blume. The only issue I think I had with the book was that the essays got a little repetitive. They did talk about a lot of the same books and talk about a lot of the same lessons. Other than that, it was a great way to go down memory lane!

[Melissa (Distracted by New Grandbaby) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a HUGE Judy Blume fan as a kid, and this book is a collection of essays from others who come from the same era and same feelings as myself.

[Anne-Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I consider myself someone who isn't in to short stories. But then almost every time I read a book of compiled shorts, I change my mind and decide that I should read more short stories. Part of my reluctance to embrace the short story is because I don't want to invest in something that will be over so soon. But then when I read one I once again realize that not everything has to be lengthy and detailed. Sometimes short is just long enough. And if the stories in this book were any longer, I would have stopped reading.

Everything I Need to Know got irritatingly repetitive toward the end.

A bunch of essays on how this or that Judy Blume book impacted this or that female writer who came of age in the 1970 - 80's. Most of the authors are of the chick-lit genre - which I have no pretentious problem with or anything - except that the majority of it seems *to me* to be highly unoriginal. It's like the same book over and over with a slight change in the details. I felt like there was meant to be some sort of "confessional" tone to the book that just failed miserably.

Their was one story that really stood out - not just the best story in a tedious book of stories - but a really funny and sincere 9 pager that made me thankful I had stuck with it. Written by Jennifer Coburn (who?), Guilty House focuses on the lesser known Blume book Iggie's House (I was so tired of having the Margaret and the Forever and the Deenie deconstructed and compared by the time I had read the first quarter. And those are books sacred text!) which explores the subject of White Guilt. The First Black Family to Move to Town! There Goes the Neighborhood! I don't think a lot of people have written about how white people try so hard to seem so down with the brothers and sisters. I wish I had written this.

I do love Judy Blume though. I even have a dog named Judy Blume (who refuses to shit outside, by the way. thanks, Jodi).

I might re-read some my old Judy Blume favorites to see what I think of them now . . .

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume as I loved Ms. Blume's books when I was a pre-teen, and I also enjoy reading others' impressions of shared interests. Yet, this book -- a collection of essays -- was a letdown for two reasons. First, nearly half of the entries were highly personal recollections that would have been more appropriate for the writers' private journals than for a public tribute to an author. (I often wondered if they had read the entire books they referenced, or just the controversial parts.) Secondly -- and more importantly -- the book was very poorly edited. As it was a collection of essays, I would have expected a Foreword by the editor that explained, for instance, the reason she developed this book and why she selected the contributors she did. (A paragraph on the back cover does not suffice.) In fact, a shortened version of the editor's own submission, an essay in which she describes "Judy Blume moments," could have served part of this purpose. Additionally, the order in which the essays were presented was haphazard, and the submissions were skewed toward just a handful of Ms. Blume's stories.

There were several essays that saved this book from a 1-star rating, among them Cry, Linda, Cry by Meg Cabot, I Am by Erica Orloff, It Wasn't the End of the World by Kristin Harmel, and, my favorite, The Mother of All Balancing Acts by Beth Kendrick. These entries captured the connection that Ms. Blume magically made between her fictional characters and her very real readers, which is the true reason her work is, and will continue to be, treasured by so many.

[Sarah McCoy Isaacs · Rating 3 out of 5]

In films, they typically show people doing one of two things when in the home of someone for the first time, be they a potential friend or foe:
1)snooping in their medicine cabinets or
2)scanning the titles on their bookshelves.

While I've never done the first I do the second regularly. If a potential friend still has some of the best young adult fiction alongside the most dense non-fiction titles proudly and to balance them out, then it's a pretty safe bet we are going to be good friends. The Velveteen Rabbit? Charlotte's Web? All good signs. However, if I am at the house of a recently-made girlfriend and if I spy upon her shelves a Judy Blume book, or better yet should I zero in on a copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that looks as battle-weary from the wars of life laid away in books as my own copy now is, then I have a very strong and particular sense wash over me that this is most likely the start of a beautiful friendship indeed. That is the sense of fictive kinship you get reading some of the better essays in this anthology - the shared, hysterical and hard-fought highs and lows that we all went through and keep hidden most of the time but should perhaps consider laying bare to one another more often.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved loved loved this collection of essays! Over twenty short essays by current women authors who grew up with Judy Blume books and digress on how identifiable the characters were and that they even helped them through some of the same coming of age issues. Several mentioned that Judy Blume wrote about things that nobody ever mentioned...and in that, created bonds among all young women who read and will continue to read her works. Even for myself, I can recall how my friends and I responded to Forever...we dog-eared all of the "sexy" pages and reread passages over and over...sometimes laughing, sometimes in plain shock!

This was also a great way for me to become familiar with some of the contemporary authors and seek out the books that they have written.

The best thing that I am walking away with after reading this book though is, just like reading a Blume book for the first time, I realize that I am not alone and there are women out there that feel the same way I do and have the same fears as well. Knowing that makes some of the fears dissipate. Now if only Judy Blume could right again for the age bracket I am in now...

[fleegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

so far the essays in this book are great. it's interesting to read about how much these women authors loved judy blume's books, and how much the books helped them during their adolesence. i remember reading judy blume books, but not really loving them because they were all about girl stuff and i wasn't so girly. the whole thing about "oh no! i'll be the last girl in my class to start my period! why god, why?!" i totally didn't get. well, that and by the time i read it ('80s) we didn't have to use belted pads so that was a bit confusing to me as well. i should write an essay about judy blume books and how i was more confused than before i read the books!

i'm thinking maybe i read them too early? and now, now it's too late. aw.

but this book is really entertaining because a lot of the authors are writing these deep, dark adolesent secrets and then doing the whole (sorry mom!) thing. hee. good stuff.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any compilation of essays, they were hit or miss. Adored Meg Cabot's essay, others were kind of redundant. I had no idea Blubber and Forever... had such life impact for so many. I was more taken with Are You There God It's Me Margaret but I enjoyed them all. I certainly agree with the sentiment expressed by all the authors: growing up in the 1970's, especially in Catholic school, I learned far more about navigating the world from Judy Blume than any other source, and I continue to be grateful to her for paving the way for authors to confront tween and teen issues in such a realistic fashion.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have given this three stars but honestly after a while I couldn't even finish it. I contemplated twice about putting it down for good.but decided to persevere and wade through it. That didn't last long at all. To be honest it's best to read this book after reading all of the Judy Blume books mentioned in the many stories that fill the pages. Since I haven't read them all and it's been decades since I've read any, I felt a little lost. Some of the stories, particularly the first one, are hilarious and some take some digging to figure out the Judy Blume "connection" but almost all of them are raunchy to the point where it started to bother me. Not really worth my time to read handfuls of stories about sex; learning about it as pre-teenagers and how they put it to use as adults. TMI...

[Shelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nope, I learned nothing from Judy Blume. (Well, possibly coping skills from Sally J Freedman, but I suspect that she just reinforced my existing ones.) But wow, a lot of women really did. Some of these essays were very interesting, others a real stretch. But really, my favorite Blume books were about Fudge, Peter and Sheila, and those weren't covered at all.

Originally: This looks like fun, even though I don't think I learned anything about being a girl from Judy Blume. I never even read Forever, which seems to be THE Blume. But I did love Sally J Freedman, so maybe I learned a little after all. We'll see.

[Jamie Dacyczyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

2015 Reading Challenge: A Non-Fiction Book.

3.5 stars. I actually really enjoyed this. Definitely made me nostalgic to re-read all of those old Judy Blume books. This is a collection of essays from women who recall feeling influenced or helped by JB's books in some way as they were growing up (or as an adult). It's essentially an ode to Judy Blume. Anyone who grew up reading her books would enjoy this book.

I would have liked to see some more diversity among the writers, since this was very cis-gendered and hetero-normative....which makes sense since JB pretty much only wrote about boy-girl relationships, given the times, and certainly no transgendered girls....But, oh well.

[Susie Delaney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. This read like homework. This read like a bunch of term papers, book reports, essays that someone put together in a collection and put a cover on it and tricked us in to grading it for them. I didn't even get halfway through before jumping ship. I wouldn't have been surprised if every section started "What Judy Blume means to me, by so-and-so" Skip and just go re-read the actual stories they are talking about.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was great for nostalgia - made me want to go to the library and check out all of the Judy Blume books I'd read over and over when I was younger. But it was a bit repetitive. A lot of the essays were extremely similar - people all felt the same while reading Deenie and Forever. So when you'd hit a rare Blubber chapter, it was a pleasant surprise. They probably could have done more to get some variety in the essays. But overall it was a great trip down memory lane.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a walk down memory lane! This is what I'd hoped to get from Tolstoy and the Purple Chair - the love of books and how much they mean to us. I appreciated that it wasn't all about being a "girl" though. It reminded me how hard it was to be 12, how much books helped me through that age (and many others...), and what it means to be human. Not all essays were equally appealing, but I loved more than I didn't. Can't wait for book club next month!

[Jess Van Dyne-Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a romp, remembering books I haven't read in years.

I enjoyed it, especially hearing other perspectives on the Blume books (I didn't pick up on the coming-of-age and embracing-her-sexuality of Deenie at all when I read it)

but it did get a bit long. VERY good if you read a few, then walked away for a few days, instead of gulping the book down.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really disappointed in this collection of essays. I was hoping for more depth, more "ah ha!" moments but it was mostly just "here's what happened to me and it also happened to {insert Judy Blume character here} so I didn't feel like I was the only one". Boring. Sorry to say I didn't get past the first 4 essays.

[Thamar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many times I felt like putting this book down and reading Judy Blume books first. I felt like I was out of the loop in many parts and I was wanting to reach and just be and know what they were talking about. But it was good enough where the writers could still pull me into their memories and make a connection with them. Because of this book I shall now know and read Judy Blume books.

[Tanya C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was kind of fun, to re-live how you felt reading those books with writers who read them as young girls. The particular authours that had essays in the book aren't necessarily the ones I read often (More chick lit over all than I read) but it was still a fun book to send you back to those books which were so much a part of growing up.