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In Blume's Deenie, the 13-year-old narrator faces disease and ignorance in Elizabeth, NJ. Suffering from scoliosis, Deenie must wear an ugly, uncomfortable back brace. The experience helps her overcome the primitive adolescent fear of being different. But Deenie represents up-to-date psychology as well. Could her curvature of the spine have been caused by occasional masturbation? Set straight by a briskly efficient gym teacher named Mrs. Rappoport, Deenie muses: "I never knew there was a name for what I do. I just thought it was my own special good feeling. Now I wonder if all my friends do it too?"
Blume explores both the spirit and the senses. In Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, the twelve-year-old protagonist must choose her religion. Margaret's father is Jewish, her mother Episcopalian. The girl also fears that she will be the last of her clique to menstruate. Prays Margaret: "I'm going to be the only one who doesn't get it. I know it, God. Just like I'm the only one without a religion. Please. . . let me be like everyone else."
The petite, attractive Blume, daughter of a New Jersey dentist, wrote her first children's book 13 years ago, when her two children were young. They are now in college, and the divorced author divides her time between a New York City apartment and a suburban home in Santa Fe, N. Mex. These days she keeps her highly praised ear for dialogue in tune through the 2,000 letters that she receives each month from youthful admirers. Asked one twelve-year-old: "Do you write your books from your mind, or do you use a kit?" Blume hardly needs a blueprint. Says she: "I don't have a teen-age audience in mind when I write. I try to get inside the mind and skin of a kid, and let the book find its own audience." One nine-year-old requested, "Please send me the facts of life in number order." Blume replied, "Ask your parents." She hates to see her explicit novel of first love, Forever, on the shelves next to books for younger children. The bittersweet romance, however, is the volume most requested by teens in the New York Public Library.
Sexual angst is not the only way to the heart of the market. Orphaned Ponyboy Curtis, 14, and his greaser pals, for instance, are too busy fighting to date girls. In S.E. Hinton's bestselling The Outsiders, Ponyboy and his hoods battle Socs (Socials), who cruise their mean streets in Mustangs and madras shirts looking for loners. The results: manslaughter, murder, despair. But out of the rubble of class structure, sensitivity rises triumphant. Says Ponyboy: "What kind of a world is it where all I have to be proud of is a reputation for being a hood, and greasy hair? I don't want to be a hood, but even if I don't steal things and mug people and get boozed up, I'm marked lousy. Why should I be proud of it? Why should I even pretend to be proud of it?"