[Forever …] may be just the book to replace the now dated Seventeenth Summer even though it is officially coming out as an "adult" book…. Once the thousands of girls who grew to love Judy Blume when she led them through their first menstrual periods with Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret find that she is now offering to lead them through their first experiences with sexual intercourse, they will seek out the book regardless of whether or not we have it at school—...

[Forever …] is a story as told by the adolescent heroine, about an affair with another seventeen-year-old that germinates, burgeons and finally goes to seed. As a narrative technique, talking straight from the adolescent's mouth can also act as camouflage for slack writing, not entirely avoided here. Although it may be in character for the narrator to rhapsodize about eyes that are "very dark, with just a rim of green and other times they sparkle and are greenish-gray all over", ...

[Forever …] is a very explicit account of a teenage love-affair written in the style of a magazine story, peppered with the three dots that used to be left for the imagination to fill in although in this case nothing whatever is left to the imagination…. All the right messages are put over, about responsibility and birth-control and not having abortions and illegitimate babies, but all the same I think it is pornography and so a limiting rather than a widening of experience. It suggests patter...

How the world turns. Twenty years exactly after Beverly Cleary's Fifteen … was first published, in which it took Our Hero 174 out of 175 pages to kiss Our Heroine, appears Forever … by Judy Blume … in which the first kiss is accomplished on page 3. By page 20 they're discussing virginity ("No boy had ever come right out and asked me …"), and by page 25 the groping has begun. In fact, this story is about first-time intercourse, explicitly described, jus...

Sex, for all its sometimes gruesome oughts and shouldn'ts, never deserved Forever … …. Judy Blume takes more than just a peek at Kath and Michael making it in Summit, NJ. From first base all the way to home, we get the blow by blow. Kath loses her virginity with one qualm—she doesn't have an orgasm. 'Maybe it was the rubber,' Michael says. Maybe it was. Anyhow, they work it out (they love each other, don't they?): but satisfaction leaves tristesse and ...