What sort of picture would a being from another planet form of teenage and pre-teenage America were he able to read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret and Forever? He would imagine that youth was obsessed with bras, period pains, deodorants, orgasms, and family planning; that life was a great race to see who was first to get laid or to use a Tampax; that childhood and adolescence were unpleasant obstacles on the road to adulthood—periods (sorry!) of life to be raced through as quickly as po...

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret … is about menstruation and religion, in that order. Margaret Simon, aged twelve, has two crushing anxieties on her young shoulders: when will she begin to menstruate? and in which church will she, born of Jewish father and Christian mother, find the official seat of the God she chats to so cosily in moments of stress? The story is inconsequential. The book consists largely of the endless body-obsessed prattle of Margaret and her friends, and as such will ...

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 ...

Are American children exceptionally articulate about their problems, I wonder? I find it hard to imagine a group of small girls here anxiously discussing a longed-for puberty in the way the heroine of Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret does, though the author assures us that she is recalling her own pre-'teen emotions. At all events, this comedy depends on the discussion which Margaret, who is rising twelve, holds with the rest of her gang about menstruation and chest measurement and (in th...

With sensitivity and humor, Judy Blume has captured the joys, fears and uncertainty that surround a young girl approaching adolescence [in "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret"]. Margaret Simon, almost 12, frequently chats with God, relaying all her problems concerning puberty and religion (she is the only child of non-religious, mixed-marriage parents). Margaret's story is any young girl's story, but when Judy Blume writes it there is an exception—it is directed ...