Summer Sisters by Judy Blume

Recently, I watched a documentary on the children’s author, Judy Blume. It came as a surprise to me that many of her books had been banned. My reference to her body of work was Story of a 4th Grade Nothing and Super Fudge, which I read frequently to my son when he was young. In graduate school, I remember reading Blubber, a book that was the first, that I knew of, which addressed school bulling. Curious to learn more about how this beloved author fell from grace, I picked up the book Summer Sisters. The story was about an ordinary girl from a struggling working class family who learned the lure of privilege from a complex friendship. In this book, Judy Blume depicted a teenage girl’s fascination with sex, her sexual experiences, and the protagonist’s loyalty confusion with the two families she had begun to see herself as belonging to. I discovered Judy Blume’s goal was to write stories that were real to the life experiences teens were having. For some. this is were she stepped over the line. You be the judge of that.