Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret

 By Judy Blume

Atheneum  1970

171 pages     YA

When I saw that the brilliant 1970s YA novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was being made into a movie, it brought back my first year as a librarian when the book was published. I absolutely loved the book but worried about putting it in the Middle School library because of some of the topics Blume covers in the book: “menstruation, burgeoning sexuality and fraught gender dynamics, religion, the barefoot-in-the-sprinkler joys and gossip-twisted tribulations of girlhood.” The New York Times article describing the movie suggests the book has “been both banned and beloved for it.” Indeed, I put the book in the library and never had a problem with people concerned about it. That was 1970—way before book banning because a “thing.”

But now I have two 12-year-old granddaughters and my love for the book caused me to re-read it and buy copies for my granddaughters. It was absolutely as good as I remembered it to be. What I had not remembered was the focus on religion. Margaret’s father is raised Jewish and her mother was raised Catholic. Margaret is interested in religion and trying to figure out the differences between the faiths her parents were raised with. After praying “Are you there, God?” many times, she decides she won’t have a religion, like her parents. I guess you could call her “spiritual but not religious.” This concept, too, has caused the book to be banned as well.

I am so looking forward to the movie when it is released on April 28. You can find the trailer here. There is also a just-released documentary about Judy Blume on Amazon Prime. It’s gonna be a Judy Blume week.

P.S. I just read a really good review of the movie on the LitHub website. Here it is.