Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Fudge, Peter, Sheila and the rest of the gang are here - in brand-new irresistible editions from Berkley Books.

Annotation

Peter finds his demanding two-year-old brother an ever increasing problem.
The Big Winner I won Dribble at Jimmy Fargo's birthday party. All the other guys got to take home goldfish in little plastic bags. I won him because I guessed there were three hundred and forty-eight jelly beans in Mrs. Fargo's jar. Really, there were four hundred and twenty-three, she told us later. Still, my guess was closest. "Peter Warren Hatcher is the big winner!" Mrs. Fargo announced.

At first I felt bad that I didn't get a goldfish too. Then Jimmy handed me a glass bowl. Inside there was some water and three rocks. A tiny green turtle was sleeping on the biggest rock. All the other guys looked at their goldfish. I knew what they were thinking. They wished they could have tiny green turtles too.

I named my turtle Dribble while I was walking home from Jimmy's party. I live at 25 West 68th Street. It's an old apartment building. But it's got one of the best elevators in New York City. There are mirrors all around. You can see yourself from every angle. There's a Soft, cushioned bench to sit on if you're too tired to stand. The elevator operator's name is Henry Bevelheimer. He lets us call him Henry because Bevelheimer's very hard to say.

Our apartment's on the twelfth floor. But I don't have to tell Henry. He already knows. He knows everybody in the building. He's that smart! He even knows I'm nine and in fourth grade.

I showed him Dribble right away. I won him at a birthday party," I said.

Henry smiled. "Your mother's going to be surprised."

Henry was right. My mother was really surprised. Her mouth opened when I said, "Just look at what I won at Jimmy Fargo's birthday party." I held up my tiny green turtle. "I've already named him . . . Dribble! Isn't that a great name for a turtle?"

My mother made a face. "I don't like the way he smells," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. I put my nose right down close to him. I didn't smell anything but turtle. So Dribble smells like turtle, I thought. Well, he's supposed to. That's what he is!

"And I'm not going to take care of him either," my mother added.

"Of course you're not," I told her. "He's my turtle. And I'm the one who's going to take care of him."

"You're going to change his water and clean out his bowl and feed him and all of that?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "And even more. I'm going to see to it that he's happy!"

This time my mother made a funny noise. Like a groan.

I went into. my bedroom. I put Dribble on top of my dresser. I tried to pet him and tell him he would be happy living with me. But it isn't easy to pet a turtle. They aren't soft and furry and they don't lick you or anything. Still, I had my very own pet at last.

Later, when I sat down at the dinner table, my mother said, "I smell turtle. Peter, go and scrub your hands!"

Some people might think that my mother is my biggest problem. She doesn't like turtles and she's always telling me to scrub my hands. That doesn't mean just run them under the water. Scrub means I'm supposed to use soap and rub my hands together. Then I've got to rinse and dry them. I ought to know by now. I've heard it enough!

But my mother isn't my biggest problem. Neither is my father. He spends a lot of time watching commercials on TV. That's because he's in the advertising business. These days his favorite commercial is the one about Juicy-O. He wrote it himself. And the president of -the Juicy-O company liked it so much he sent my father a whole crate of Juicy-O for our family to drink. It tastes like a combination of oranges, pineapples, grapefruits, pears, and bananas. (And if you want to know the truth, I'm getting pretty sick of drinking it.) But Juicy-O isn't my biggest problem either.

My biggest problem is my brother, Farley Drexel Hatcher. He's two-and-a-half years old. Everybody calls him Fudge. I feel sorry for him if he's going to grow up with a name like Fudge, but I don't say a word. It's none of my business.

Fudge is always in my way. He messes up everything he sees. And when he gets mad he throws himself flat on the floor and he screams. And he kicks. And he bangs his fists. The only time I really like him is when he's sleeping. He sucks four fingers on his left hand and makes a slurping noise.

When Fudge saw Dribble he said, "Ohhhhh see!"

And I said, "That's my turtle, get it? Mine! You don't touch him."

Fudge said, "No touch." Then he laughed like crazy.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About The Author:

Name: Judy Blume

Current Home: New York's Upper East Side, Key West, and Martha's Vineyard

Date of Birth: February 12, 1938

Place of Birth: Elizabeth, New Jersey

Education: B.S. in education, New York University, 1961

Awards: Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association, 1996

* Judy Blume's official web site

Biography

Before Judy Blume, there may have been a handful of books that spoke to issues teens could identify with; but very few were getting down to nitty-gritty stuff like menstruation, masturbation, parents divorcing, being half-Jewish, or deciding to have sex. Now, these were some issues that adolescents could dig into, and Blume s ability to address them realistically and responsibly has made her one of the most popular and most banned authors for young adults.

Are You There God? It s Me, Margaret , published in 1970, was Blume s third book and the one that established her fan base. Drawing on some of the same things she faced as a sixth grader growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Blume created a sympathetic, first-person portrait of a girl whose family moves to the suburbs as she struggles with puberty and religion. In subsequent classics such as Then Again, Maybe I Won t , Deenie , Blubber , and Tiger Eyes , Blume wrote about the pain of being different, falling in love, and figuring out one's identity. Usually written in a confessional/diary style, Blume s books feel like letters from friends who just happen to be going through a very interesting version of the same tortures suffered by their audience.

Blume has also accumulated a great following among the 12-and-under set with her Fudge series, centering on the lives of preteen Peter Hatcher and his hilariously troublesome younger brother, Farley (a.k.a. Fudge). Blume s books in this category are particularly adept at portraying the travails of siblings, making both sides sympathetic. Her 2002 entry, Double Fudge , takes a somewhat surreal turn, providing the Hatchers with a doppelganger of Fudge when they meet some distant relatives on a trip.

Blume has also had success writing for adults, again applying her ability to turn some of her own sensations into compelling stories. Wifey in 1978 was the raunchy chronicle of a bored suburban housewife s infidelities, both real and imagined. She followed this up five years later with Smart Women , a novel about friendship between two divorced women living in Colorado; and 1998 s Summer Sisters , also about two female friends.

Blume has said she continually struggles with her writing, often sure that each book will be the last, that she ll never get another idea. She keeps proving herself wrong with more than 20 books to her credit; hopefully she will continue to do so.

Good To Know

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was inspired by an article given to Blume by her babysitter about a toddler who swallowed a small pet turtle. She wrote a picture book introducing Fudge (based on her own then-toddler son), the turtle, and older brother Peter; but it was rejected. A few years later, E. P. Dutton editor Ann Durell suggested that Blume turn the story into a longer book about the Hatcher family. Blume did, and the Fudge legacy was born.

Blume is not an author without conflict about her station in life. She says on her web site that, as part of her "fantasy about having a regular job," she has a morning routine that involves getting fully dressed and starting at 9 a.m. She has also getting out of writing altogether."After I had written more than ten books I thought seriously about quitting," she writes. "I felt I couldn't take the loneliness anymore. I thought I would rather be anything but a writer. But I've finally come to appreciate the freedom of writing. I accept the fact that it's hard and solitary work."

Blume's book about divorce , It's Not the End of the World , proved ultimately to be closer to her own experience than she originally imagined. Her own marriage was in trouble at the time, but she couldn't quite face it. "In the hope that it would get better I dedicated this book to my husband," she writes in an essay. "But a few years later, we, too, divorced. It was hard on all of us, more painful than I could have imagined, but somehow we muddled through and it wasn't the end of any of our worlds, though on some days it might have felt like it."

Her most autobiographical book is Starring Sally J. Friedman as Herself , says Blume. "Sally is the kind of kid I was at ten," Blume says on her web site.

Blume keeps setting Fudge aside, readers keep bringing him back. The sequel Superfudge was written after tons of fans wrote in asking for more of Farley Hatcher; again more begging led to Fudge-a-Mania ten years later. Blume planned never to write about Fudge again, but grandson Elliott was a persistent pesterer (just like Fudge), and got his way with 2002's Double Fudge .

Feature Interviews

From the September/October 2002 issue of Book magazine

When Judy Blume wrote Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing , her first book in the Fudge series, in 1972, she was a 34-year-old fledgling author with two young children. Thirty years later, Fudge, the tempestuous toddler based on Blume's son, is only a couple of years older -- while Blume is a grandmother with a household name. This time around, Blume says, she wrote about Fudge for her daughter's 10-year-old son, Elliot, who has been begging her for another Fudge book since he was seven. She made him work for Double Fudge by taking him to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There, they were initiated into the unofficial Panda Poop Club, which entails holding and sniffing the poop of a genuine panda. "It was so totally pleasant," she says. "It just looked like a poop, but it smells like grass."

Of course, this is necessary research -- Double Fudge includes a panda poop scene -- for an author who has always displayed a knack for knowing exactly what kids are interested in. (The new book has a couple of other scenes that play to a toddler's affection for discussing bathroom habits. "They love it!" she says.)

Anyone who has ever read anything by Blume -- including Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret ; Forever ; Blubber ; and Deenie -- knows she doesn't shy away from topics that make most adults uncomfortable. It's not that she goes for shock value; she just writes the truth about taboo subjects. She's written about menstruation, masturbation and teenage sex. She's fought censorship along the way, but the truth has paid off: Blume's books have sold more than 75 million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Judy Sussman attended New York University, where she earned a degree in education and married a young lawyer, John Blume, her junior year. Soon thereafter, she had two children: a girl, Randy, in 1961, and a boy, Larry, in 1964. After enrolling in a writing class at NYU, the then-housewife wrote a few magazine articles before publishing her first book, The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo , in 1969. Although she wrote an edgy teen book dealing with racism in 1970 ( Iggie's House ), it wasn't until the publication of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret later that year that her name began to register among readers and critics. "I think that's the one that made me think I really am a writer," she says. Although that book, about a girl's struggle with puberty, has become something of a bible for girls, Blume says she never meant for it to be anything but a fictional chronicle of her own experiences. "I was really writing about the kind of kid I was in sixth grade, the late developer."

Over the years, Blume published many more books for children and teens, as well as several for adults. Three years after she divorced her husband in 1975, she wrote her first adult book, Wifey , about a frustrated young housewife. (In 1987 she got remarried to George Cooper, a nonfiction writer.) In 1998 she published Summer Sisters , a novel about a long-standing friendship between childhood friends. Soon after she told Cooper that Summer Sisters would "be the end of a wonderful career," the book shot to the top of bestseller lists.

In her lush Upper East Side penthouse (her third home in addition to ones in Key West and Martha's Vineyard), the lithe Blume talks about her upcoming Fudge tour. She says her publicist asked her to send a video of herself to the bookstores. "And I said, 'What -- to show them I'm still living? So people won't recoil in horror from looking at me?' Please. It's so weird, this age thing," she says. "You can write until you drop." She's not sure she will, though.

"I always say every book is my last. It's like having a baby," Blume says. "But two years later, you're thinking, 'I can do this again.' "