Read at Your Own Risk! Tracing Adolescent and Parent Reception of Judy Blume\u27s Forever, 1975 to the Present

This paper traces changes in adolescent and parent reception of Judy Blume\u27s groundbreaking Young Adult novel Forever over the thirty-five year period between the book\u27s publication and the present. A look at newspaper and magazine articles about Forever, combined with literary analysis of the book itself, is situated among the changing historical and cultural contexts into which each source was published. A literature review of the scholarship surrounding the children\u27s and adolescent genres frames this analysis, offering insights into the questions of how and why children and adults read. Correlations between changing American attitudes toward sexuality and the rise and fall of challenges to Forever suggest that responses to sex in children\u27s literature are in many ways a product of their moment in time. Moreover, the parental anxiety that Young Adult literature can produce reflects a disconnect between the ways in which parents and their children read, understand, and appreciate books in the genre