I love the laughs in Tales of a “Fourth Grade Nothing” and was titillated when, in fifth grade, friends began passing around the book “Forever.”
Still, my favorite Judy Blume book is the elegiac “Tiger Eyes.” A girl from Atlantic City–soul-shaken after the murder of her father–tries to find her footing when her family moves to Los Alamos, New Mexico.
She’s a stranger in a strange land, a desert city that’s both beautiful and harsh, a place that harbors new friends and dark memories of the birth of the atomic bomb.
The story is told in the present tense, from the first-person viewpoint of 15-year-old Davis “Davey” Wexler. I recently found a copy of the book at a thrift store and though it’s been tens of years, I’m going in.
As I recall the books I chose to read or was assigned to read as a child, I realize something. Kids can handle reading about the hard stuff. Someone else’s tragedy is their own heartbreak written heard.
They are better prepared than many adults to watch characters be made, unmade and remade after being toppled by fate, temperament or circumstance.
Who else considers “Tiger Eyes” to be a literary triumph? What moody children’s or YA books still haunt you pleasantly?
–Sarah Torribio
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