Published by Bradbury Press in 1970, the young-adult story dealt with a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood, a timely topic at the time when civil rights laws had eliminated many of the legal barriers segregating communities in America, yet ingrained prejudices remained.
But it was another book of Blume's published that same year, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, that caused a greater stir. It begins with 11 year-old Margaret's recent move from Manhattan to New Jersey—perhaps her parents' strategy to woo her from her doting grandmother, Sylvia, who is appalled that her son and daughter-in-law, an interfaith marriage, are "allowing" Margaret to choose her own religion. Margaret immediately makes a group of sixth-grade girlfriends at her new school, suffers embarrassment because she has no religious affiliation, buys her first bra and worries when her friends begin menstruating before she does, and prays to God to help her deal with all of this. Only a 1965 novel by Louise Fitzhugh, The Long Secret, had dared broach this last concern, and had been met withcriticism by the literary establishment for what was termed "unsuitable" subject matter for juvenile fiction. Feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg wrote in her 1997 treatise, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, that as a professor she discovered Blume's book was cited as the favorite novel from their adolescence by young women who had come of age in the 1980s.
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