The period just before we reach adulthood is often filled with turmoil, and most of us face some dark moments. It features other weighty issues, too, including a teenage boy struggling to work out his sexuality, a suicide attempt and a teen pregnancy. And it feels modern in its feminism: Katherine is a strong-minded young woman who doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to. Ever aware of her responsibilities to her audience, she sends Katherine to a family planning clinic to get contraception. And the dismissiveness with which adults treat kids and teens - which, of course, was part of Blume’s point - now feels dated and disturbing.The result is a totally realistic, utterly unpreachy love story, in which Blume depicts Katherine’s first sexual experiences as initially painful, then highly enjoyable. Blume’s ubiquitous male doctors examining young female patients - typical back then - now reads as creepy and paternalistic. The one poor gay teen in “Forever …” is closeted and lands in a psychiatric hospital. “The Lottery” meets “Lord of the Flies,” I thought, even with (minor) empathy gained and lessons learned. In “Margaret,” as in others, there’s meanness about girls who are overweight or develop early “Blubber” is a brutal, if completely era-realistic, tale of fifth-grade bullying, with the narrator one of the (lesser) bullies. There’s disparagement of a girl with eczema and of the special needs class. “She’s so ugly she makes me want to vomit,” 13-year-old Deenie tells us in, unfortunately, the way many able-bodied kids talked about disability in those times. In “Deenie,” for instance, the narrator buys gum from “Old Lady Murray,” a woman with kyphosis, or what we then called a hunchback. And she won’t remove it for him, in an ending that’s upbeat, heartwarming and as empowering in 2021 as it was in 1974. Buddy Brader still wants to kiss Deenie even in her brace. There’s often a girl who gets picked on and a popular boy who’s ultimately not as awesome as advertised - though sometimes the cool guy is okay, too. Her narrators tend to be quiet-ish, with best friends who are faster or bolder, smarter or prettier and, sometimes, less moral. Blume gets precisely and amusingly inside the mind-set of protagonists who are neither saints nor villains (arguably, in the case of Jill Brenner in “Blubber”) but simply realistic ’70s girls (granted, of a certain background), who are simultaneously originals and types. There are questions of religion and God, of place and alienation, of social acceptance and rejection - the stuff of great literature. As I moved on to “Forever …” and “Blubber,” I noted that while the dilemmas are seen through the eyes of young narrators, neither the main characters nor the books themselves feel insignificant or fluffy.

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