By Judy Blume
Karen is twelve, her parents are getting divorced, and she has a plan to stop it, which is the saddest and most recognizable thing about her.
Karen Newman's parents fight. That's what they do now, all of it, all the time, and then her father moves out and the word divorce is on the table. Karen decides this is a mistake she can correct. If she can just get the two of them in the same room, in the same good mood, they'll remember. So she schemes. She keeps a notebook. Her friend Val, whose own parents are divorced, is briskly expert about the whole business and keeps a scrapbook of famous divorced people, which Karen finds no comfort at all. Meanwhile her father is planning to go to Las Vegas to file, her fourteen-year-old brother Jeff is so angry he can barely speak and then runs away, and her little sister Amy is six and wetting the bed. Karen's plan gets its chance. It fails. Then her mother says she's selling the house, and Karen, who has fought this from page one, finds out what it is to stop fighting it.
Blume got there first, in 1972, and she got it right: she wrote the fantasy every child of a divorce has and then declined to grant it. That's the book's whole nerve. Karen isn't sad in a general way, she's busy, she has a scheme, she is certain, and watching that certainty come apart is far more affecting than being told she's upset. Blume also gives all three children different responses, Karen plots, Jeff rages and bolts, Amy goes small and regresses, which tells a child that whatever they're doing with this, somebody in the book is doing it too. And the title is the argument. It isn't the end of the world, it just feels exactly like it, and the book holds both of those at once for two hundred pages without once telling Karen to cheer up.