Starring Gramercy P. Riff as Herself

Drawing inspiration from a humorous post by the fabulous Noble Savage (who was inspired from another blog post), I am going to embark on a personal project, a journey if you will. I am going to reread two books from my preteen/young teen years. They were among my favorites and the first two that came to mind when I submitted a comment to her post. I had many favorites growing up. Quite a few. In fact, I could be found with my nose in a book most of the time. But these two came first to mind and there simply has to be a reason for them to linger so freely around my conscious state.

I didn't have what you would call an ideal childhood and books were my saving grace. I could escape from all my troubles and not have to worry about life outside of the pages for a nice block of time. The best was that in addition to being free on loan from the library, my school had age appropriate tomes in each classroom from which the students could "borrow" as needed. I put borrow in full on finger quotes because now in my thirties, I still have to return a few of them back to Mrs. Sadie's fifth grade classroom.

The books I quoted and chose to reread are Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, and Deenie. After reading Nobel Savage's post, I got caught up in the idea of learning why these books originally clicked with me. I want to look at the pages with adult eyes and sort of understand my psyche way back when. Why these books? How come I chose them off the shelf? A voracious reader, I did have an air of pickiness, but what was the appeal of these particular two? I was a fan of Blume, having read her work at fairly age appropriate times. Yet, I never bothered to read the ever popular Tiger Eyes, and Are You There God, it's Me Margaret found its way to me after I had started puberty. Which wasn't so hard since I developed breasts at the age of eleven.

Since I will be airplane bound tomorrow, I think this is the perfect time to start rereading and revisiting these stories all over again. Especially since I'm flying an airline that utilizes only a few movie screens for everyone to goggle at in cattle class. It will also give me time to reflect on what it was about them that appealed greatly to me.

It's hard to say what I will discover from this project. It could come to naught and I might discover that I was a perfectly well adjusted child in choosing my reading material. Besides, it's more in the spirit of wonder. But, there is a bit of interest at what my mind might pick up on. Either way, it's definitely going to be fun to revisit these books.