Rod Raglin
This blog will touch on the experiences I have as a writer (not to be mistaken for my experience as a writer, i.e. how many books I've written, etc); the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the satisfaction and the frustration, the magic and the reality - have I left anything out, oh yeah, the rejection, rejection and more rejection, the humiliation and the embarrassment, the jealousy and the resentment - that pretty much covers it, except for why I do it which perhaps I'll realize along the way. Are you totally confused? Good, let's begin.
In the Unlikely Event compelling, entertaining, if a bit juvenile
In the winter of 1951-52 three commercial passenger planes crashed within the city limits of Elizabeth, New Jersey, the city being on the flight path into Newark Airport. There were over a hundred fatalities including some residents.
In the novel, In the Unlikely Event, author Judy Blume, who was a young girl and a resident of the city during that period has taken the experience and crafted a fictional tale of growing up in the fifties with these disasters as a backdrop.
This is a coming of age novel focusing on family and friendship with a host of characters including the heroine, fourteen year old Miri Ammerman, her single-parent mother Rusty, her maternal grandmother Irene, and her uncle Henry, a reporter. There’s also a host of Miri’s friends, their families and even a boyfriend.
Blume somehow manages to keep it all straight by telling the story in multiple points of view and each time it changes using the person’s name as a heading for the section.
The novel is well crafted, the characters are fully developed and the writing is simple and straightforward.
In the Unlikely Event is compelling and entertaining if you like a story primarily told from a young girl’s point of view. This reader found the ending to be overly optimistic but was grateful all the same for the characters I came to grow fond of.
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