Although Judy Blume wrote many books for children, teens and adults, "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret" is still, 50 years later, probably her most important book. It details the life of 11 year old Margaret Simon, who has moved from Manhattan to suburban New Jersey, and is dealing with a variety of problems, including impending puberty and theological confusion. The book is 150 pages long in my edition, and is written in a simple prose style.
I have probably been hearing about this book since elementary school, when my older sister read books like this, and I have used it as a way to compare modern trends in YA fiction, which despite being "gritty", are very sanitized compared to this book. So I decided I should actually read it. And after reading it, it is even more clear that like many of Blume's books, it is both revolutionary in content while having serious literary flaws---and the two are related. The thing that I disliked while reading this book is that Simon, while dealing with so many big issues, often comes across as a blank slate with not much personality of her own. Blume, and Simon, detail events in a straightforward, prosaic way that doesn't really let us know too much about what Simon is thinking. Things happen to her, but she doesn't seem to be very proactive about forming her own value system. Despite the theological angst inherent in the title, Margaret seems to take most of the world at face value. But there are two reasons for that: first, as a book written for middle school girls in 1970, and not for me, the storytelling style is meant to be simple and easy to follow. Secondly, that could be the point of the book: Margaret starts the book without much introspection or an ability to question the world around her, but by the end of the book, does learn that she shouldn't believe everything she hears (significantly, in a piece of dialog where an older boy tells her not to listen to rumors about what a precociously developed girl might be doing with older boys). So in some ways the book does include significant character development, just not telegraphed in the usual way.
But this is where the book being revolutionary, and also somewhat quaint, is a factor. The book is revolutionary because it talked about the physical facts of adolescence, including sexual development and sexual desire--things that were considered inappropriate or even obscene in 1970, and which have also disappeared from the genre since then, to the point where a popular book like The Hunger Games can detail a teenage girl killing other children for sport---but can't go as far as to talk about her menstruating. That this book talks about things like bras, periods and clumsy sexual exploration in a flat style makes it more realistic, in a way. But this book also seems quaint in a way, not just because some of the specific topics are no longer quite so important (I can't remember "interfaith marriage" being a controversy for a while), but also because it is possible to imagine an 11 year old girl being a blank slate at the time. If Margaret Simon was coming of age today, even as a sheltered girl, she might have already had access to Instagram explainers and other forms of social media that would have given her some sort of critical viewpoint to think about things such as her friends' low-key bullying or her grandparents religious bigotry. So the contradiction of this book for me is that while in some ways it was ahead of its time---talking about things that still can't be talked in young adult literature, in some ways it is hard for me to understand being a middle school student without any exposure to viewpoints outside of the immediate environment.