Adapting a Judy Blume book is something I really wanted to do, and you couldn't grow up in the '90s without knowing about 'Tiger Eyes' and reading it. It should've been assigned to all teenage girls.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.
Judy Blume especially sort of broke the boundaries of what is appropriate and what should be written about - what teenagers are actually doing.
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
Hey, don't knock Judy Blume. Without her, my younger self would never have been able to decode the random acts of madness perpetrated by the fascinating creature known as the teenage girl.
'Jane Eyre' must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And 'Kristin Lavransdatter,' and 'Lorna Doone' when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it.
I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.
I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
Tiger parenting is all about raising independent, creative, courageous kids. In America today, there's a dangerous tendency to romanticize creativity in a way that may undermine it.
We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'
Robin McKinley's 'The Blue Sword' was a defining book of my teen years, and I'd love to have more books like that in the world.