Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself

 

I love Judy Blume so I'm still amazed that I lived so long without reading her semi-autobiographical novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. It wasn't until I came across the title on a banned book list - and why it was being banned - that I knew that I had to read it. (It took me until a year ago to read probably her most frequently banned book, Forever.)

Sally is a young girl living in New Jersey in the 1940s when her brother gets sick and the family needs to move to Miami Beach for the winter, for the sake of her brother's health. Her dad needs to stay back in New Jersey to work so Sally moves to Florida with her mother, brother Douglas and their grandmother, Ma Fanny.

My earliest memories of Miami Beach were in the mid-1960s but there was a lot more similar about Miami Beach in the late 1940s that I'd chuckle over. There was one scene about having to wear a bathing cap into the pool that could have easily been written 20 years later about my cousin sitting by her grandmother Fanny's pool on Miami Beach.

Sally is hesitant about the move but between the new friends she makes, both in her apartment building and at school, and her wild imagine, Florida turns out to not be so bad after all.

Why is this book being banned? Because Sally imagines that Hitler is living undercover as a Jewish old man in her apartment building? And because she imagines him captured - or dead? That is so objectionable - how? Or by whom? I just don't get it.

Anyway, I loved the book and I'd recommend it. Especially to little girls with wonderful imaginations.