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While some of the technology is outdated (the book was updated in 1998 to swap out sanitary belts for adhesive pads), Blume writes frankly about sex, faith, and puberty, in a way that still feels very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.