Banned Book Spotlight: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

I first encountered this book when I was in the third grade and a boy in my class gave a book report on it. We all vaguely suspected him to have done it on a dare, since Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was obviously a "girly" book, and none of us could come up with any other respectable reason for him to have read it.

I don't actually remember how old I was when I read it for myself, but I do remember understanding when I had finished both why people got into such a fuss over it and why it was so important. The story revolves around the trials and travails of the life of ordinary twelve-year-old Margaret Simon. Well, almost ordinary. Unlike all her friends, Margaret has grown up without a religion; her mother is Christian, her father is Jewish, and since they can't come to an agreement of what to raise her, they decide to raise her as nothing at all and let her come to her own decision about what she believes.

On that level alone, this book was important to a young girl still trying to figure out questions of faith, but Blume's genius extends beyond Margaret's religious questioning and into the realm of her impending womanhood. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was the first fiction I ever read that dealt frankly with the social factors surrounding menstruation, and I only discovered one other book that touched on this topic during the length of my childhood (Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure, if anyone was wondering).

I had the fantastic opportunity to meet Judy Blume a few years back at a Book Expo America event, and tell her the story of how I came to read and love this book. She smiled when I told her about the boy in my third grade class who'd read it on a dare and said, "Well, I hope he learned something from it!"

Her books have been challenged pretty steadily throughout the years, and as such she's got some well-articulated opinions on censorship. To me, though, the following quote rings most incredibly true:

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."