Just As Long As We're Together

Gerti's Review of Judy Blume’s “Just As Long As We’re Together”

Judy Blume is an author that I found irresistible when I was a teenager, many, many years ago! I recently picked up one of her books at a library book sale, and realized that she kept writing even after I went to college! Her books are still designed to appeal to her traditional target audience – tweens and teens.

In this book, “Just As Long As We’re Together,” a young girl named Stephanie is getting ready to go back to school. Her best friend since second grade, Rachel, is scared about the new school year, but excited, too. Then a new girl named Alison shows up in their neighborhood, and the longtime best friends begin to drift apart. Add to that social complication the fact that Stephanie’s parents are separating, which they of course hide from her, and you’ve got a story of typically modern teenaged angst. Stephanie hates her dad’s new girlfriend, and works hard to break them up and re-introduce her mom into the love equation. Rachel has a hard time accepting Alison as Stephanie’s new friend, and the two girls have a huge fight that their parents try to mitigate. And of course, all three girls are starting to notice boys, which leads to its own problems! Oh, the drama!

More “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” than “Forever”, “Just As Long As We’re Together” is a book for young teens who may be going through the same sort of social upheavals. The lessons are softballs - it’s hard to insert new friends into old alliances, and it’s even harder to figure out the opposite sex! While I like the book’s well-defined main character, Stephanie, her friends seem like caricatures. Rachel is the prototypical “smart girl,” and Alison, the foreign, worldly one. Her mom is a famous actress, and as a result Alison has travelled the world and was even born abroad, which is pretty sophisticated for her group of friends.

Each girl has to solve her own crisis, but in Judy Blume world, it all turns out all right. JALAWT has little content that could be objectionable to parents. And while it still amazes me that middle-aged Judy Blume still knows about the silly things that worry teenagers, I guess that’s the nature of her creativity. It was amusing, as a parent, to spy on the pubescent conversations she presents here, and perhaps more than when I was young, this text shows me exactly how talented a writer Blume is. This book won’t change anybody’s life, but it is an entertaining and well-written effort by one of America’s favorite writers of teen fiction.