Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great by Judy Blume

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I hadn’t read Judy Blume in a long time - not since I was a kid, and I can’t even remember which books I read. I never really warmed to her writing back then, although I’m not sure why. Maybe I wasn’t as much into realistic literature, preferring humor or adventure. Or perhaps it was my family’s general tendency to avoid the pop culture of our own time in favor of past classics. In any case, I figured we might check a few out on our road trips. 

The titular Sheila in this one is a girl of ten, who is fearful yet afraid to admit it. She is scared of dogs, swimming, and spiders. The first two become a real issue when her family spends the summer in a small town, in the house of her dad’s colleague who is in Europe with his family for the summer. The problems? Well, there is a dog, for one thing. And also an unfamiliar place, with new people to meet. And swimming lessons. It’s a stressful summer, for sure. 

 

Sheila’s biggest problem is that she wants so much to be liked and admired that she engages in some unhealthy coping behaviors. She pretends she isn’t scared, either acting as if she is too old for whatever she is scared of, or pretending to be an expert in things she has no idea how to do. Her new friend, Mouse, sees right through it, and tries gently to get Sheila to loosen up a bit, and just admit she is scared, and be able to learn new skills rather than get defensive. 

 

There are some fascinating scenes in the book. One is the ongoing saga of swimming lessons. Sheila’s long-suffering instructor has to be creative and get her gradually over her fear of water. I appreciated the fact that the adults in this book are pretty normal - no caricatures - and the instructor seems realistically patient yet frustrated. 

 

The other scene which really stood out was the slumber party. Mouse has the idea of doing a “slam book.” I had never heard of that (neither had the other girls), but the idea was to answer questions about each other in a brutally honest way, then reveal the comments. This, entirely predictably, ends in tears. Did young girls do this when I was a kid? I really have no idea, but it sounds like the kind of casual cruelty that many of my female peers say they experienced at that age. Boys may talk trash and beat on each other, but girls take their aggression out on each other in other ways. At least in our culture - definitely the kid culture of the 1980s. I could certainly see a mile off that this was going to end badly. Fortunately, the girls are able to get over it and find more constructive ways to bond. 

 

My youngest, who is a very confident and not at all fearful 11 year old, found the book rather amusing. She is more like Mouse, after all. She loves dogs, swims in the ocean, and doesn’t play mind games. Blume doesn’t preach in this book, which is told from Sheila’s perspective, but she lets Sheila grow on her own, in the way that we all do: fits and starts and wrong moves and all. 

 

The book is pretty short, so it has to be focused, and I think Blume did a good job of picking a few events to go with the main idea. She also read the audiobook, and did a fine job. We will probably listen to a few more of her books, as our library has a number of them.