Freckle Juice

Judy Blume published Freckle Juice in 1971, and Sonia O. Lisker drew the pictures. It is a short chapter book for young children, and it came out after two books she had written for teenagers, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and Then Again, Maybe I Won't.

Andrew Marcus is the boy at the centre of it, a second-grader who wants the freckles his classmate Nicky Lane already has. Another child in the class, Sharon, sells him a handwritten recipe for a drink that she says will make freckles appear, claiming that it produced the few on her own nose; he takes it home, mixes it out of grape juice and whatever else the recipe calls for, and drinks it.

Blume worked in the other direction from usual with this book: she had the title before she had the story, and the title came from her daughter, who used to mix powder, shampoo and soap together in the bath and call the result freckle juice. As in her other books for children, she was careful to show being a child as something that contains bad days as well as good ones.