Khadijah Ali-Coleman of Fort Washington, MD was a winner of the essay contest “The Book That Changed My Life.” Below is the winning essay on Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blum:
I’ve been reading since I was three years-old. Then, my hands were barely big enough to hold a hard-cover illustrated storybook, my lap too small to hold the stacks of books I loved to pull from the shelves at the library. But, my love affair with words was immediate and addictive. Inquisitive (read: nosy) from birth, it seemed, learning to read was my passage-way into constantly unfolding stories and undiscovered worlds. During pre-teen years, my reading addiction led me to create a new type of insubordination that parenting manuals hadn’t prepare my mom for; she routinely had to reprimand me for neglecting my household chores in pursuit of finishing a new book I had checked out from the Book Mobile. So, when I became a new fan of Judy Blume’s young adult books, Mom’s job as disciplinarian became all the harder. For, my voracious appetite for books seemed only heightened when Judy Blume’s books came into my life. While Deenie, Tiger’s Eyes and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing were loved, read, and re-read, nothing was as life-changing as Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.
