You're the girl I want in my movie!
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself is a young adult novel by Judy Blume, first published in 1977.Sally Freedman is an imaginative Jewish ten-year-old from New Jersey whose family have to spend a year in Florida for her brother's health. It is a story of slice-of-life adventures and misadventures (some of them, since it's 1947 and most of the characters are Jewish, overshadowed by the events of World War II).
This novel contains examples of:
- Alcoholic Parent: Barbara's mother. Barbara says it's because her dad died in World War II.
- Author Avatar: Judy has said in interviews and biographies that Sally Freedman is very similar to the kind of kid she was at age ten.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Sally's older brother Douglas is a certified genius (he built a radio by himself at age ten, for instance). But he doesn't care enough about school to work up to his potential.
- Catch Your Death of Cold: Sally's older brother Douglas jumps across a creek with friends and ends up sitting around the emergency room in wet clothes when he sprains an ankle. His mother, being a My Beloved Smother, fears this will happen. It doesn't, but Douglas does get a kidney infection, which becomes the impetus for the family's temporary move to the warmer clines of Florida.
- Daddy's Girl: Sally Freedman. The separation from her father is the hardest part for Sally when she, her mother, brother, and grandma temporarily move to Florida. (Dad can't go because of his job).
- Disappeared Dad:
- Sally's friend Barbara has one; he was killed during World War II.
- Sally herself is absolutely terrified of her father dying, and thus having a Disappeared Dad, because her dad is 42. It turns out that both Sally's uncles were also 42 when they died. Eventually, Sally and Dad talk through this. Dad is fine throughout the rest of the book.
- I Have No Son!: Sally's next door neighbors the Daniels are extremely orthodox Jews. When their daughter Bubbles has premarital sex with a non-Jew, the Daniels sit shiva
and pretend that Bubbles is dead. Sally's grandmother is infuriated; she lost an infant son and is deeply offended that they'd play-act about losing a child when they don't know what it's actually like. - Innocent Inaccurate: This is how Sally views The Holocaust. For example, she replaces gas chambers with "big gas ovens". She also tries to get her friends to play a pretending game called Concentration Camp. Luckily, all her friends decide the game is too creepy.
- Lies to Children: Sally asks her mother how babies are made. Her mother mumbles something about how the husband plants a seed in the wife; ten-year-old Sally wants more details, so Mrs. Freedman buys her a book about it. Later on, her unmarried teenage neighbour gets pregnant and Sally asks how that's possible, since the book told her sex was something only married people did.
- Lovable Coward: Louise Freedman is this, she doesn't like to make waves (unlike her outspoken Cool Old Lady mother) and would go along with her neighbors sitting shiva for a very-much alive daughter or the Black family, they were friendly with on the train, being forcibly separated from them as soon the train goes South and dismissing it as "the way it is".
- Mr. Imagination: Sally Freedman, who makes up stories starring herself inside her head a lot, and plays elaborate pretending games with friends.
- My Beloved Smother: Louise Freedman, who is constantly afraid that death is at every corner for her children.
- The Nicknamer: Sally has a tendency to bestow rather peculiar nicknames on her loved ones. Her father, for instance, is "Dooey-bird".
- Potty Failure: Sally resolves to hold it all day during school, as she refuses to use the school bathrooms due to a lack of doors on the stalls. After racing home, she wets her pants right as she reaches her bathroom door.
- Those Wacky Nazis: This is how Sally views Hitler and presumably Nazis. Justified in that her book takes place in 1948, she is only ten, and she has received a very sanitized explanation of what Nazi Germany was.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Sally has a particular fondness for jelly sandwiches, bologna, and pickles (not all together, thankfully).
- Unreliable Narrator: Sally is a 10-year-old who is prone to fantasy and wild speculation.
