THE GENIUS OF JUDY How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

Bergstein's work is less a biography and more an examination of Judy Blume's place in the evolution and expansion of children's and young adult literature. Beginning in the late 1960s, she introduced a new kind of realistic fiction to the fantasies and didactic stories already on the shelves. Mia Barron employs an almost professorial delivery as she weaves biographical snippets of Blume's life and identifies the new cultural forces that were awakening audiences to her trailblazing fiction in which young people found their own lives reflected in the stories they were reading. Barron's delivery is smooth and consistent, but there is no vocal differentiation between details on the backlash and censorship battles that continue even today and Blume's own comments on them. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2024]