Middle school kid adapts to real life: Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't

Judy Blume Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971). Judy Blume annoyed a lot of people who believed that children’s and young people’s literature should present severely filtered versions of the real world. Why some adults think that protecting their offspring from reality will somehow help them is puzzle to me. Not that I want to push children into the dark, but when they encounter it, I want them to have some defences. Stories that acknowledge the dark, and show their protagonists as dealing with it, provide just such defences. That’s what this page-turner of a book does.
    Thirteen-year-old Tony Miglione’s father sells an invention to an entrepreneur, which means the family can move to Rosemont, and live in a big house, with a maid and such. The neighbours’ son Joel and Tony become friends, Tony develops a crush on Joel’s sister Lisa, Grandma is banished from the kitchen, and so on. Tony doesn’t know how to handle the stress of seeing the changes in his family, Joel’s shop-lifting, and the physiological and psychological effects of puberty. But he survives the year, and while there are no earth-shaking developments in his life, Tony realises that life is improving for him. The book ends on a note of “to be continued”, which may not be so for the book, but will certainly be so for Tony.
    Blume seems to have invented the “young adult” genre. This now almost 50-year-old book still reads well. Recommended ****

 

Burt Wetanson and Thomas Hoobler. The Treasure Hunters (1983)

     Burt Wetanson and Thomas Hoobler. The Treasure Hunters (1983) Humans hunted by aliens, a tired cliche, maybe. In this young-adult fiction Wetanson and Hoobler do a good job of putting a new twist on it: The Hunters have psychic powers, which they must not use. But one of the humans, Billy Miller, a teenager with self esteem and girl problems, is on the verge of the Discovery. How he learns of his powers, and why the Aged Master decides he must be initiated into their full use, forms the backbone of the story, which  is a pretty straightforward quest. The perils and encounters are well enough told that they ring true, but the characters are explained rather than shown. As SF, the book rates a solid ** (2007)