Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing

"Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing" (I think) kicked off Judy Blume's popular "Fudge" books (It kicked off the franchise for me at least; and prompted me to, to this day, go back and reread "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing," "Superfudge," and, lastly, "Fudge-a-Mania." I never got into "Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great" and, therefore, don't know where it would fall in the sequence of the canon).

Judy Blume did for Peter and Fudge what Beverly Cleary had done for Beezus and Ramona long before and she crafted a narrative about the dynamics between an older brother and younger brother (I guess I was somewhere in between the two dynamics; I am the older sibling but my younger is a sister; a sister who has NEVER been nearly as bratty as Fudge or the younger version of Ramona [possibly by Age 8, there were some similarities in imagination; but this was about "...Fourth Grade Nothing.")

I first heard "...Fourth Grade Nothing" recited to me in (where else?) the Fourth Grade and I was hooked. It was the first time I had ever heard a story from the First-Person narrative, thereby putting me in such situations alongside Peter as a disastrous dinner with his father's agency clients, his brother wanting to be every animal between a bird and a dog, his brother's behavior at Hamburger Heaven and the shoe store, and Peter just trying to reclaim his place at home with his family and at school with his friends.

It was one thing to hear this book recited aloud to me in the first person. It hit me quite differently to read the first-person and recognize that, though my sister is (thankfully) quite different from Fudge, to struggles for place in the family and with friends are still the same.

It would take a great elementary-school-aged work to prompt a 38 year old man to want to revisit as though revisiting an old friend from time-to-time; and "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" fit the bill.