This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Judy Blume’s Forever wasn’t a book that most readers just stumbled upon. “Obtaining, hiding, and reading it—and then sharing it with others—was a rite of passage for many teens who came of age during and after the sexual revolution,” Anna Holmes writes of the teen novel. “Well-worn, dog-eared copies were passed around or hidden in closets, dresser drawers, and backpacks.”

Part of the appeal of the book, which was published 50 years ago this October, was its choice to depict sex from the perspective of the female protagonist—“sexuality was (and still is) rarely depicted in popular culture fro

See Full Page