It brings back so many memories of Judy Blume books, and that time period where every girl I knew read Judy Blume - we tried increasing our bust size like Margaret, and shared the pages in Forever (you know the pages), we all knew Judy Blume characters, they were the books of our childhood, and early adolescence.It also brought me back to why I am a reader, what I find in the pages of a book and what I look for. I am a lit major - I spent a lot of years deconstructing and analyzing words and st

Now I have always simply adored Judy Blume as an author and therefore, I was very much looking forward to reading this here compilation of "Judy Blume" themed essays. However and sadly, I have indeed found Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume pretty well massively and utterly disappointing and not really at all what I was in fact looking for. For while I had fondly expected and hoped that Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume...

I was so excited to read this book. I recently bought my 12-year old niece the "Best of Blume" 4-book set for Xmas. It has all my favorites: Are You There God?, Blubber, Starring Sally J., and Iggy's House. I was probably fresh from the rapturous online purchase when I noticed Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl in the "People who bought this book also liked.." bullshit section. So I jumped up from my desk and headed to the stacks with my call number, eager to hear what kind of magic

You have no idea how much I wanted to like this book. I was a huge Judy Blume fan as a kid, so I figured that a tribute to her had to be pretty good as well. Nope. Perhaps if the 20-some contributing writers had each written something unique, the book would have been tolerable, but it's nothing but "Just like Sally J. Freedman, I..." and "Like Margaret, I..." through the whole damn thing. And, if I counted correctly, the plots of Deenie and Forever... were re-hashed 6,000 times. There were one o...

While occasionally offering something genuinely touching or amusing or what-have-you, this collection of essays by current girl-teen and chick-lit authors on their connections with various Blume characters served mainly to remind me that Anything You Should Need To Know About Your Girlhood Can Supposedly Be Learned from Judy Blume. There’s a recurring mantra in these books that I remember reading on their covers years ago, the idea that they reflect the secret identity of every girl. Here you ca...

I had high hopes for Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume as I loved Ms. Blume's books when I was a pre-teen, and I also enjoy reading others' impressions of shared interests. Yet, this book -- a collection of essays -- was a letdown for two reasons. First, nearly half of the entries were highly personal recollections that would have been more appropriate for the writers' private journals than for a public tribute to an author. (I often wondered if they had re...

In films, they typically show people doing one of two things when in the home of someone for the first time, be they a potential friend or foe: 1)snooping in their medicine cabinets or 2)scanning the titles on their bookshelves. While I've never done the first I do the second regularly. If a potential friend still has some of the best young adult fiction alongside the most dense non-fiction titles proudly and to balance them out, then it's a pretty safe bet we are going to be good friends. The V...

I liked this book in that it took me down a pleasurable trip down memory lane. If you're American and a girl, most likely you will have read at least one Judy Blume book in your formative years. Blume books are a coming of age guide for tween girls. And a few of the writers' stories, I thought were interesting.What I didn't like about this book is how poorly written most of these stories were. You could definitely tell what genre they wrote and not at the top of their genre either. Other than Me...

For all those Judy Bloom fans out there - boy does this book bring back some memories and make you want to crack open those old volumes and see what insight you can get from them now that you are past awkward adolescence. (Indeed, some of the contributors speak to this very thing.) However, after a awhile the essays got a little old. They seemed to say the same thing and focus on the same Judy Bloom books and/or characters (I lost count of how many times "Forever" was referenced). On one hand th...

There are moments where this book slips. That's no surprise, what with the fact that it's a collection of essays from so many different female writers. Some essays get boring, a few come with that unpleasant realization that you don't like the person writing them. But they're all pretty interesting in that they show how important Judy Blume books were for women who were teenagers in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I work with teen readers at a library. I don't see them hustling to pick up Forever...I thin...

This book made me laugh harder than I have in a long time! From start to finish I felt like I was a member of special club of girlfriends. We all grew up in the seventies, watched (or were forbidden to watch) the same t.v. programs. I kept thinking, “Me! That was me back then!” And the author Judy Blume was the rockstar of kid lit at that time. Like the other members of this club, I first encountered her writing through reading “Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing” and “Otherwise Known As Sheila the...

2.5 As a middle-aged white, American woman in 2020, I obviously grew up on Judy Blume books. I am the target audience for this collection. But it is so repetitive, and honestly, Forever was a WAYYY bigger deal to most of these women than to me. Look, Judy Blume was groundbreaking. She wrote things for children and young adults that nobody else was writing. And she made them feel like the big deal that they were to the person involved, while also simultaneously somehow depicting that in the schem...

After reading twenty-three mediocre (IMO) essays by other female writers (I liked Meg Cabot's essay), I've come to the conclusion that I never felt a connection with Judy Blume's character because I had a fairly normal, non-dyfunctional childhood and adolesence. - My parents are still married to each other. - I didn't/don't have any conflicting feelings about religion.- My mom took the time to explain to me that some day I would start menstruating and what that meant. - Although I was "the new k...

The point -- that Judy Blume reflects universal experiences (as long as you're white and middle-class, which is the unspoken part of the point) that nonetheless tended to strike readers as personal revelations -- is well-taken, but also makes these essays, by and large, pretty unreadable. No one has anything interesting to say, and how could they, when the task at hand is to create variations on the theme "why my girlhood was a normal American girlhood and therefore Judy TOTALLY GOT ME." I'm as

If you were into Blume's books at least somewhat, you would enjoy this collection of assays by modern and young female authors describing ways in which their lives were touched by her writings. Typically I am not into collections; I like a good involved story, not a bunch of shorties. But this was the exception. While some of the essays were take or leave it, a good 80% offered much insight into youth and the transition into adulthood and expectations and of course how this tremendous author was...

I loved Judy Blume as a child and I have read just about all of her books. This book filled me with nostalgia for the books I did read and made me want to read the books of hers that I hadn't gotten to yet. There were lots of stories about lessons that these authors had learned from Judy Blume. The only issue I think I had with the book was that the essays got a little repetitive. They did talk about a lot of the same books and talk about a lot of the same lessons. Other than that, it was a grea...

I consider myself someone who isn't in to short stories. But then almost every time I read a book of compiled shorts, I change my mind and decide that I should read more short stories. Part of my reluctance to embrace the short story is because I don't want to invest in something that will be over so soon. But then when I read one I once again realize that not everything has to be lengthy and detailed. Sometimes short is just long enough. And if the stories in this book were any longer, I would

so far the essays in this book are great. it's interesting to read about how much these women authors loved judy blume's books, and how much the books helped them during their adolesence. i remember reading judy blume books, but not really loving them because they were all about girl stuff and i wasn't so girly. the whole thing about "oh no! i'll be the last girl in my class to start my period! why god, why?!" i totally didn't get. well, that and by the time i read it ('80s) we didn't have to us...

I would have given this three stars but honestly after a while I couldn't even finish it. I contemplated twice about putting it down for good.but decided to persevere and wade through it. That didn't last long at all. To be honest it's best to read this book after reading all of the Judy Blume books mentioned in the many stories that fill the pages. Since I haven't read them all and it's been decades since I've read any, I felt a little lost. Some of the stories, particularly the first one, are

As with any compilation of essays, they were hit or miss. Adored Meg Cabot's essay, others were kind of redundant. I had no idea Blubber and Forever... had such life impact for so many. I was more taken with Are You There God It's Me Margaret but I enjoyed them all. I certainly agree with the sentiment expressed by all the authors: growing up in the 1970's, especially in Catholic school, I learned far more about navigating the world from Judy Blume than any other source, and I continue to be gra...