Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Over Nine Million Copies Sold Worldwide.
Meet Margaret. She’s going through all the same things most teenage girls have to face; fitting in, friendship and first bras.
Life isn’t easy for Margaret. She’s moved away from her childhood home, she’s starting a new school, finding new friends - and she’s convinced she’s not normal. For a start she hasn’t got a clue whether she wants to be Jewish like her father or Christian like her mother. Everyone else seems really sure of who they are. And, worst of all, she’s a ‘late developer’. She just knows that all her friends are going to need a bra before she does. It’s too embarrassing to talk to her parents about these things. So she talks to God instead - and waits for an answer …
Judy Blume’s bestselling classic teen novel, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret features a fresh, contemporary cover look.
Review
Kealy Siryj
I revisited Judy Blume’s cult favourite Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as it turns fifty years old in 2020. I first read Blume’s widely challenged book when I was eleven, and although Margaret Simon was an eleven-year-old New Yorker in the 1970s, and I was growing up in suburban Melbourne in the 2000s, she felt very familiar to me. Margaret’s anxiety about her period and impending adolescence is almost universal.
While some of the technology is outdated (the book was updated in 1998 to swap out sanitary belts for adhesive pads), Blume writes frankly about sex, faith, and puberty, in a way that still feels very much relevant. As a children’s bookseller, it is obvious to me how much of coming of (tween)age writing is informed and inspired by Blume. To open up conversations about puberty with tweens in 2020 read (or re-read) Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, and then follow it up with Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann’s Go With the Flow or Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth’s Sex Is A Funny Word. For ages 10+.
Kealy Siryj works as a bookseller at Readings Kids.
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