Amy Reiter

Most of us know Judy Blume as the woman who wrote those books we devoured as we grew up — novels that shaped our development, perhaps more than we even realized. We may have started with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and the rest of the Fudge series, then moved on to books like Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. Blubber, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Deenie and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t and eventually graduated to that dog-eared copy of Forever we giggled over with our friends and hid from our parents.

We’ve passed these much-loved paperbacks along to our children. Perhaps some of us have remained Blume readers even in adulthood — digging into her books for grown-ups, like Wifey, Smart Women and the 1998 bestseller Summer Sisters. When Blume wrote the latter, she said it would be her last book for an adult audience, and she remained true to her word for years. But then, in 2009, the idea for her new book, In the Unlikely Event, hit her — like “a ton of bricks,” she says — and she knew she had to write it …

Judy Blume: Flight Paths and Trigger Warnings (Barnes & Noble Review)