In this article, the author describes several innovative activities for engaging students in studies of literary characters: voting on superlatives for characters, creating characters' Facebook profiles, and composing creative dialogs in which characters from different works meet each other. The author points out that it is this self-knowledge…

Argues that Judy Blume's novels are not so much the recreation of closely observed individuals but the fleshing out of general life processes from the statistics of contemporary psychology. Points out the need for books that do not simply stress accepting things as they are but encourage the hope of changing reality through individual effort. (MM)