Though, honestly, if she turned twenty-five and she still wasn’t engaged, she saw no point in saving it. She might as well enjoy it while she still could. She was pretty sure Aunt Alma had never enjoyed hers. [p. 37]
Purchased on a whim when it was part of Amazon's daily deal: I have vague but fond memories of reading Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret as an adolescent, and the premise of this novel -- written for an older readership -- seemed intriguing. It's based on real events: three planes crashed in Elizabeth, a small town in New Jersey, over a period of 8 weeks in the winter of 1951-52. Judy Blume grew up in Elizabeth and was in eighth grade that year, and she's writing from her own lived experience.
The protagonist of the novel is Miri Ammerman, who's 15 and lives with her mother Rusty, her Uncle Henry and her grandmother Irene. Her father abandoned her mother before Miri was born, and nobody will tell Miri anything about him. On Rusty's birthday (just before Hannukah and Christmas) she and Miri are walking home after seeing a film when the first plane crashes. Miri's best friend Natalie rushes to their house in floods of tears, afraid Miri has been hurt: Natalie's father, Dr Osner, has been called to help identify the bodies.
Blume is so good at capturing the different layers of life. Yes, Miri is horrified by the crash, but she's also still thinking about the mysterious boy she danced with at Natalie's party. Natalie herself believes that one of the victims of the crash, a dancer named Ruby, is talking to her. The boys at school are talking about zombies, communists, space aliens. Uncle Henry is a newspaper reporter, filing copy from the scene of the crash... Blume handles multiple narrators (we meet Ruby early on, 'savouring a scrumptious strawberry ice cream soda topped with whipped cream, chopped nuts and a Maraschino cherry') with confidence, and though Miri is at the centre of the novel her story is fleshed out by the other narratives. The secondary characters don't always get more than a single scene to themselves, and don't necessarily reveal their innermost secrets, but they add context -- even Ruby's ice cream soda is relevant.
One crash would have been calamitous enough: three crashes, in such a short space of time, have a devastating effect on the people of Elizabeth. Everybody knows somebody who's died, either on the ground or in one of the planes. And everyone has to keep on keeping on, to work or go to school, to begin or maintain or terminate relationships, to keep or tell secrets or to have their secrets discovered. As much as anything else, this is a closely-observed and compassionate study of small-town life in Fifties America.
Despite the triple tragedy and the ongoing Korean War, despite the threat of the draft hanging over young men and the smaller heartbreaks of teenaged life (cheating boyfriends, pregnancy scares, eating disorders, handed-down clothes), this was an immensely uplifting novel. The framing narrative, of an older Miri attending a commemoration of the crashes, settles everything into perspective, but doesn't overshadow the clarity and honesty of that winter's events. I'm now quite tempted to reread Margaret, just to see if the warmth I remember from that is comparable to the emotional ambience of In The Unlikely Event.
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