{"id":137918,"date":"2015-12-28T10:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T15:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=137918"},"modified":"2015-12-14T16:51:32","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T21:51:32","slug":"rachel-reviews-in-the-unlikely-event-judy-blume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=137918","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Reviews: In the Unlikely Event – Judy Blume"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"InWhen Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a <\/em>community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Judy Blume experienced in the early <\/em>1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, Blume <\/em>imagines and weaves together a haunting story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, <\/em>whose lives are profoundly changed by these disasters.<\/em><\/p>\n

Did you know that Judy Blume is, like, the OG of young adult authors? I knew that, even though somehow I never read one of her (20+!) books growing up. Maybe that\u2019s why I had such high hopes about In the Unlikely Event<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> and maybe why I felt so disappointed after finishing it \u2013 she\u2019s Judy Freakin\u2019 Blume. There is a GIF of her kayaking down a river of words on her website<\/a>! She intervened when that husband gave away his wife\u2019s 24-year-old copy of Are You There God? It\u2019s Me, Margaret<\/em><\/a>!! Anything she writes should be awesome-sauce!!!<\/p>\n

So when I heard that she was publishing an adult novel, I got excited to jump on the Judy Blume Train and have my first Judy Blume Transformative Reading Experience\u2122\u2026 and then I started reading In the Unlikely Event and it became a slog through flat characters and superfluous details.* \u2639 There were just too many characters and plot threads \u2013 spiraling off into who cares and what the heck is going on and why is this character never mentioned again \u2013 packed into a 400-page book with one omniscient voice that couldn\u2019t inflect or modulate its tone. I\u2019m definitely sure that In the Unlikely Event<\/em> was an updated example of the Adolescent Coming of Age trope found pretty much everywhere (in every time), but I\u2019m only kind of sure it was supposed to be about Miri, Blume\u2019s teen stand-in to the real events she both experienced and then fictionalized for the book. Because there\u2019s, like, twenty-five characters who get POV chapters but only about five who get the lion\u2019s share but then most of them relate to Miri some way except when they don\u2019t\u2026.(Do you see my problem here???)<\/p>\n

Miri\u2019s a good narrator: she\u2019s reliable and self-assured, but still in that questioning place where \u201cwhat does it mean to exist in a world that doesn\u2019t always make sense?\u201d seems less twenty-something apathy and more a genuine grapple with existentialism. From her perspective, having a succession of plane crashes be the driving force of the novel is understandable. Being fifteen is hard enough without external motivators; add in trauma and grief and love and hormones and suddenly aviation mishap (which every single summary mentions, btw) transforms into a pretty interesting inciting incident. But without that? Without Miri\u2019s particular view of what\u2019s happening? In the Unlikely Event<\/em> becomes a slow crawl through Blume\u2019s failed attempt at writing multiple perspectives \u2013 her lack of plot induces boredom, her plethora of characters merit confused head-scratching, and her fictional doppelganger\u2019s existential angst gets lost in the shuffle of Blume mentioning everything in lieu of missing anything.<\/p>\n

*These are verbatim:<\/p>\n

\u201cWish me luck,\u201d Kathy said. \u201cI\u2019m going to call home now.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u201cGood luck.\u201d<\/em>
\nKathy went out to the pay phone in the hall to dial her parents.<\/em><\/p>\n

Because I need to know that \u201ccall home\u201d means picking up a phone receiver and dialing a number??<\/p>\n

They changed into their nightgowns, leaving their underwear since they weren\u2019t going to sleep for hours.<\/em><\/p>\n

Because knowing a character\u2019s underwear situation is imperative to the plot???<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, Blume imagines and weaves together…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":137919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,80,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-rachel-reviews","category-staff-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/In-the-Unlikely-Event.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-zSu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137922,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137918\/revisions\/137922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/137919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}