by Judy Blume
First published 2015
In 1987, Miri Ammerman drives back to Elizabeth, New Jersey for a memorial service she has avoided for decades. She returns to confront memories of 1952, when she was fifteen and falling in love for the first time. That year, multiple commercial airplanes crashed in her community, one after another, terrorizing residents and changing everything. The disasters shattered the optimism of the early 1950s, when air travel promised adventure and everyone believed they could go anywhere. Miri watches her neighbors struggle with fear while she navigates first love and friendship against this backdrop of tragedy. A young reporter arrives to cover the crashes and builds his career on the community's pain. The story moves between three generations of families and strangers whose lives intersect through these real events that Blume witnessed as a child. Set in an era of Nat King Cole songs, Elizabeth Taylor hairstyles, atomic bomb fears, and Communist paranoia, the novel explores how people endure disaster and find ways to continue living.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Elizabeth, New Jersey
Period: 1952, 1987
402 pages · Hardcover · Knopf