I raced through the entire Fudge series as we packed up one house and unpacked another. Impossible, of course, but that’s still what I believe, a kind of magic that trained me from an early age to look, when lost, for footing in books. Instead, they seemed to find their way to me whenever I needed them. Judy Blume’s books didn’t need to be bought, or checked out, or siphoned from the shelves at school. They were dispatches from my inner world, so attuned to the storms of childhood and adolescence I blushed while reading their pages. I always felt that way reading Judy Blume’s books-it’s one of the reasons I loved them. It had a little illicit charge I didn’t like adults to see me reading it. It was a chapter book, a revelation-more words than pictures, which meant more places to disappear, more space to find myself. If I wasn’t careful, I might miss a sentence. Some of the pages were stuck together, as if the previous reader had done so with a glass of Sharon’s freckle juice in hand.

Freckle Juice just appeared one day, as if summoned. My family was weird-my dad, for example, was not really mine-and my baby sister did things like stick beads up her nose and scream all night long. I knew what it was like to be all wrong, even then, at what, five or six or so? I had glasses before any of the other kids on my street.

A peeling white ring distorted poor Andrew Marcus’s face, his fake freckles and buck teeth in the center of the bullseye. The cover of Freckle Juice was warped, as if someone-my mother, maybe?-had used it as a coaster.

Books like freckle juice