by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 26, 2010

It was Judy Blume's first book. Just one year later, she'd write "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." And the next year she'd write another of her best-known books: "Then Again, Maybe I Won't." But in 1969, she launched her career with a poignant children's book about a seven year old called The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo.

It's ostensibly about Freddy's part in the grade school play,  but it's really about his feelings on being the "middle child" in his family. He gets hand-me-down clothes from his older brother Mike, and has to give up his own room to his little sister Ellen. And Mike doesn't play games with Freddy, while Ellen is too little. "Freddy figured things would never get better for him. He would always be a great big middle nothing!"

Obviously he'll feel better if he gets a part in the school play - but the specifics of the story make it feel real and affirming. The play is reserved for fifth and sixth graders, but there's a sympathetic drama teacher - Ms. Matson - that thinks Freddy can fill a special part.  He stands on the stage as she has him shout for his audition.  And soon Freddy is excitedly rehearsing his role around the house - as the Green Kangaroo.

The audience loves him, and by the end of the book, "He didn't even care much about being the one in the middle. He felt just great being Freddy Diesel."

Judy Blume shows her trademark sensitivity to young characters and their problems - and she's helped by the engaging illustrations of Irene Trivas. Trivas fills in the sketches with light, simple colors, which help give the book its gentle tone. The sketches are funny, like a cartoon, while suggesting realistic representations of the characters' world. And the soft lines make the story more personal, as the reader's imagination fills in the details using Judy Blume's descriptions.

There's a funny story about the illustrations, according to Wikipedia. Blume once drew her own pictures as illustrations for the story. She used little colored pencils, and fastened them together "with little brass fasteners like I was still in school." It was ultimately Trivas's sketches that brought the characters to life, and Blume jokes that she's ashamed of her own illustrations, saying "I have kept them in the closet…

"I told my children that if they try to publish them after I die I will come back and haunt them."

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