Judy, Judy, Judy... I'm pretty sure Judy Blume made me want to be a writer. Or at least she made me into a reader. I *was* her target 1970s pre-teen audience and read every one of her middle-grade and teen books about Margaret, Deenie, Sally J. Friedman, and Sheila the Great. I did not read her later "adult" books, but this one intrigued me because a) I'm revisiting writer Judy in my quest to be a YA author, and b) it's based on actual events that happened in 1952, when 3 planes crashed into the well-populated suburb of Elizabeth, New Jersey, within a 3-month period, killing the passengers on board as well as people on the ground. Each of the planes crashed near a school or orphanage, one of them just a few blocks from where the pilot's own daughter attended high school, and after the third plane crashed the old Newark airport location was shut down.
Judy Blume lived through these events as a teenager and decided to tell this amazing story of how the town dealt with these tragedies.

Short version of my writer review: Judy makes it look simple. Her prose is simple and her characters are real people with simple thoughts who use simple dialogue. Although I know it's not as simple to pull off as it looks - and, in this case, she did an incredible amount of research about the crashes and about 1950s America to flesh out these stories - it's ultimately a simple read. Maybe that makes it a great story to read - I mean, I did not put it down! And these people witnessed or lost friends in 3 plane crashes! - but there is not a lot of depth, of language or of character.

The decision to use multiple POV is central to Blume's desire to tell the story of a *town* - an entire community - and, while the thread of the story does connect everyone through the life of a young teen character named Miri (the authors stand-in), there are ultimately probably 20 different character POVs presented. Everyone in the town is connected, and several of the passengers on the doomed plane are also connected to the townspeople. It is a story of intertwined lives.

I understand Blume wanted to do this in order to show how the crashes affected the entire community, and how else to get to know about and care about the passengers on the planes than to introduce them in context, as characters, before the crashes? I found the "everyone gets a POV chapter" method ultimately less satisfying, though, as we just get the surface level of each character's life and the story - and the connections - often feels rushed because of it. Something to think about as a writer, especially as everything I've written so far has been 1st person POV, a single character's life and thoughts.
Breadth v. depth? Which do you prefer?