Forever...

I don’t know what all the hubbub is about. Birth control and teen pregnancy and foul language? Please. I think those are the least offensive aspects of this book. For me it wasn’t the fact that Blume made sex and “love” and contraceptives an integral part of her book that bothered me. It was how cavalier it all was.

This is tricky, reviewing a book meant for young adults, especially when it deals with very adult themes. I was left wondering: what age of reader was this book written for? The characters in it are seniors in high school and in a place in their lives where things like sex and relationships are the norm, if not the entire focus of their days. But the way it was handled, the way Blume breezes through the actions, the emotions, the sincerity of the characters makes me think that this book is meant for children. Is it?

I have a hard time placing proper reading levels. I was reading Judy Blume’s so-called “adult” novels by the time I was twelve. And that’s not me bragging, I swear, but this book seems ludicrously simple to me. The characters are all one-dimensional and the ways in which they deal with the issues of impending adulthood were flat, unimpressive, and downright immature.

I’ve always been a highly emotional person (understatement of the century), so maybe it’s me, not Judy. After all, I was writing Sylvia Plath quotations in a notebook in ninth grade, lamenting the end of my first relationship. But, no, I think it is Judy. I think it’s offensive to write a story about young love and make it so… vanilla. After Michael kisses Katherine for the first time she describes it as “a nice kiss, warm but not sloppy” (10). Um, WHAT? That’s her only reaction? Am I a freak of nature then? Was I the only person who ran into the front door of her house, jumped up and down like a pogo stick on the kitchen linoleum, grabbed my mother by both shoulders, and squealed, “I did it! I kissed him!” Ok, I probably was. I had an unusually close relationship with my mother from a very young age. She was the only person who knew I had lost my virginity for months. But still, I remember my first kiss being incredible. Warm, yes, but also feeling a sense of the room fading around us, a sense that the only thing happening in the entire world was the meeting of our lips and the timid touch of our tongues. But maybe that’s too much information for children. Maybe that’s why Blume writes about love in such a blah fashion? Maybe my version is a bit too… erotic? Which brings me again to the question: who in the world is this written for? If it’s written for young adults, people old enough to be engaging in the behaviors described in this novel, then it’s offensively simplistic. Would I mind if my daughter read a book about sex and birth control and teen pregnancy and suicide? No. Would I mind if my daughter read a book about sex and birth control and teen pregnancy and suicide that dealt with these serious issues so flippantly, so childishly? Yes!

I mean, seriously. What the hell, Judy? You have a girl who sleeps with a lot of men, becomes pregnant, doesn’t know the father, and gives birth to the child just to “experience childbirth”?! Can I say “WTF?” in a book review? WTF, Judy?! If I had read this as an eighteen year old, I would have been insulted.

And if it is meant for children considerably younger, and therefore less emotionally evolved, than the characters, then I get the uproar. This book reads like a book meant for a girl in elementary school. Would I want my eight-year-old daughter reading a book that handled sex as some romanticized act where everyone is magically orgasming all the time? (Do not make me launch into my tirade about the socially irresponsible implications of suggesting that the female orgasm is easy to attain with the flip of a wrist, the touch of a finger.) Would I want my eight-year-old daughter reading a book that handled teen pregnancy as a fun adventure to have one summer? HELL NO. If you’re going to going to discuss those topics, do it responsibly. Show the consequences. Show the effects of those decisions. Not just, “On Thursday morning, Michael’s birthday, Artie hung himself from the shower curtain rod in his bathroom. Luckily, the rod broke and he fell into the tub, winding up with a concussion and an assortment of cuts and bruises. He was stitched up at Overlook, then transferred to Carrier Clinic, a private psychiatric hospital near Princeton” (150). Really? That’s ALL the attention you’re going to pay to teen suicide?

And WHY is there so much sex? Sex everywhere. Sex on every page! I read this sitting at a small table at Starbucks, and little children would sit down with their parents next to me with a steaming cup of hot chocolate, I would make a right angle of the pages to prevent them from seeing the sex. Sex everywhere!

I had a fairly sexually charged high school experience, so I don’t think that I am unqualified to say this: I don’t think I ever thought about sex as much as these characters do. In fact, I don’t think I ever really thought about sex or talked about sex when I was making out with a guy or taking off my clothes with a guy. We were in high school. We were mastering the art of foreplay. And when I did have sex there wasn’t some huge build up to it. It just happened. One day we were not having sex, and then the next we were having sex. Blume’s version seemed melodramatic at best.

The New York Times Book Review called this book “a convincing account of first love.” I disagree. Where were the genuine emotions? Where was the feeling that everything was so drastic, that every bad is the end of the world? It’s a feeling that only teenagers, without any sense of foresight, are capable of feeling.

Get with the program, Judy. I’m disappointed in you.

I give this book one star, which I think is generous. But I guess I kind of appreciated the attempt at a moral, which was that teenagers are too young to understand “forever.”

(Author’s note: I’m not a Judy hater. If you are looking for an informative book for young children about sex and relationships, I actually highly recommend the book Letters to Judy. I found it at a yard sale when I was young and read it cover to cover many times. It’s detailed, informative, and a wonderful resource for children to understand the experience of growing up without feeling self-conscious of “weird.”)