A huge, unquestioning audience awaits any book by the author of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. But even Judy Blume's young teenage fans may find [Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself] hard going in places. Blume still captures the anxieties and dreams of her heroines, but an uneventful winter in Florida for a 10-year-old from New Jersey fails to bring Sally close to the reader. The year is 1947, and Sally's preoccupation with Hitler's atrocities among the Jews (including some of her own relations) is a potentially important theme, but it is trivialized by poor taste and unnecessarily ghoulish fantasies. To further weaken the novel, Sally's own Jewish family is surprisingly stereotyped. Sally Freedman is described as autobiographical, which may account for its rambling attention to trivia and its inconsequential plot. The resulting novel is too long and too slow-moving for the age group and certainly lacks the sympathetic spark of Margaret. (p. F4)
Brigitte Weeks, in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1977, The Washington Post), August 14, 1977.
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