On my first exposure to Blume, a few years ago, I turned out to be immune to Blume fever. Her realism struck me as shallow, and I was put off by her knack for observing unpleasant details. Recently, I read her again, determined to find her magic formula, and I am now ready to amend my views. In a Judy Blume book, realism is everything. True, it has no great depth, but it is extraordinarily convincing. True, she includes unpleasant details—things we all notice but usually don't mention—yet they increase the credibility that is the source of her magnetic power. Blume's technique might be compared to cinéma vérité. She writes as though filming the landscape of childhood from the eye level of a child. She focusses on nearby objects and immediate events with a child's intense gaze, picking out details that evoke instant recognition. As in a play, dialogue carries the story along. It is colloquial, often funny, and always revealing. Blume doesn't waste words. Her stories are told in the first person—sustained soliloquies that are prodigies of total recall. Each book begins on a note of candor. We have the feeling of reading a secret diary—something the writer intended only for himself. Thus, it seems natural when usually private matters are included. Often, they are things that have to do with the dawning of sex, and though most are quite innocuous it is a shock to see them suddenly exposed in print. The effect is a mesmerizing intimacy, which convinces Blume's readers that she writes the whole truth about what kids think and feel. (pp. 193-94)
No report on Blume is complete without a look at "Forever," the book for which some critics have not forgiven her. "Forever" is the case history of a teen-ager's affair, in which Katherine, seventeen, deludes herself that she is truly in love and sleeps with Michael, also seventeen. Blume's description of what Katherine and Michael do in bed, and what Katherine feels, is a carefully worded answer to questions hygiene manuals fail to address. The affair ends when Katherine falls out of love and realizes emotions can be unreliable. I found the encounter one of the dullest on record, but it is easy to see that a naïve reader must find it fascinatingly revealing. It is equally obvious that such a book could kick up quite a storm.
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