50th Anniversary Review: Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great
The story of a girl who isn't always as confident as she seems.
Author: Judy Blume
Originally Published: 1972
When asked about some of the most well-known writers for young adults in the 1970s, Judy Blume is the name that probably comes to readers’ minds the most. She started off the decade by publishing two novels for young readers that examined challenging topics. One of them was Iggie’s House, in which a young girl who learns about the racism within her community after an African American family moves into her neighborhood. The other was Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, where a preteen tries to understand how she feels about God and religion just as she and her friends are starting to go through puberty.
Both these books cemented Blume’s place as one of the most influential children’s and young adult writers of the decade. She remained so prolific during the 70s that in 1972, she had a total of three novels published throughout the year: It’s Not the End of the World, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great.
Today’s review will focus on the third novel, which is the first of four sequels to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, which tells the story of a boy named Peter Hatcher and the crazy situations he gets into on account of his mischievous younger brother Fudge. The novel focuses on Sheila Tubman, Peter’s sworn enemy, and what happens when she and her family leave New York City for the summer and stay in the village of Tarrytown, where Sheila must face some of her worse fears.
The novel begins the week before summer vacation begins. Ten-year-old Sheila Tubman is about to get onto the elevator of her apartment building when she notices Peter Hatcher there with his dog Turtle. Sheila is afraid of dogs, but because there’s no way she wants Peter to know this, she pretends it’s Turtle’s smell that bothers her and chooses to take the stairs to her place instead of the elevator despite how hot the day has been.
When she arrives at her apartment, her mother is upset over how Sheila decided to take stairs under such strong heat and requests that her thirteen-year-old sister Libby go out to buy milk instead of her. Libby, who’s been practicing dancing, is mad about having her practice interrupted and makes fun of Sheila when she finds out why she hadn’t gone on the elevator.
Later that day, her father comes home with information on their upcoming summer vacation. Sheila hopes they could be going to Disneyland, but instead he tells the family that they will be staying in a placed called Tarrytown, where they’ll remain in a house that belongs to one of the professors he works alongside with, who will be spending the summer in England with his wife and three sons. Sheila is disappointed at first but is soon delighted when she finds out she’ll be having her own room in this house, since she shares a room with Libby.
However, things go wrong the moment they arrive in Tarrytown. Sheila finds out the Egran family has a dog named Jennifer that stayed behind, and that the room she’s supposed to stay in belongs to a boy who leaves a threatening note over how much he hates girls and how he’ll get back at anyone who touches any of the models he has in his room. To make matters worse, on her first night in the house, Sheila finds a spider in her room and keeps hearing strange noises. Her parents do their best to make things better for her. They decide not to force her to get near Jennifer, and during that bad first night, her dad finds and kills the spider while her mom helps her discover that Jennifer is the one making the strange noises, even though this only increases Sheila’s fear of her.
However, things start getting better for Sheila when she meets a girl called Mouse Ellis, who refers to herself as the “Junior Champion of Tarrytown” because of how good of a yo-yo player she claims to be. Sheila tells her she better be careful about her nickname because her father still gets called “Buzz” despite being an adult and she’s never liked this nickname. Mouse says she doesn’t care if it’s this way because she doesn’t like her real name, which is Merle. Sheila tries coming up with a nickname for herself and decides upon Sunny, even though she rarely uses it for the rest of the novel.
She then meets Mouse’s sister Betsy, who at the age of four is already a great diver, and their mothers sign them up for day camp that afternoon. The only thing that almost goes wrong that day is when Mouse asks if they can take Jennifer for a walk, telling her that the Egrans normally let her walk Jennifer and that she can’t have a dog at home because Betsy is allergic to them. Because Sheila doesn’t want to admit she’s afraid of dogs, she tells Mouse she’s allergic to them as well. She normally doesn’t make friends with dog lovers, but when Mouse tells her she’d rather have a girlfriend than a dog, Sheila is pleased.
Sheila’s mother signs her up for swimming lessons, determined that her daughter learn to swim despite this being another one of Sheila’s worse fears. Her swimming teacher is a young man named Marty who tries his best to encourage her to try swimming, yet Sheila refuses to do much of what he says, insisting on not wanting to wet her face. Marty then has her use a kickboard so he can teach her to swim like a dog, and Sheila manages to swim a little this way. The lesson lasts half an hour, and by the time it’s over, Sheila becomes convinced that she’ll always be able to swim this way, and even concludes “I’ll bet there isn’t a dog anywhere who can dive without wetting his face”.
One of the things Shelia learns about Mouse is that the famous writer Washington Irving had once slept in her house. Mouse is astonished when Sheila tells her she doesn’t know who Washington Irving is, and she tells her he wrote Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hallow. Sheila is familiar with the former story but not the latter, and when Mouse tells her about the Headless Horseman and how he’s said to ride around Tarrytown at night, she thinks it’s scary and goes on to worry that the noises she hears at night might be coming from the Headless Horseman.
Sheila soon gets to know Mouse’s twin friends Sondra and Jane Van Arden. They decide to play hide and seek in Mouse’s house despite how her mother isn’t home. They all attempt getting into the house through the milk door near the kitchen, but when Sondra tries going through, she ends up getting stuck to the door. The other girls aren’t sure what to do, and Sheila finds herself taking charge, requesting that they get in through the regular door, and gets them to use a rope which they tie onto Sondra’s ankles to get her out of the door. They succeed at getting Sondra out, and they all go inside the house to play hide and seek as originally planned.
At day camp, Sheila and Mouse enjoy pottery the most. However, Sheila soon comes up with the idea of creating a camp newspaper because her class had one last year in school and she used to run off the copies in the office. She tells Mr. Healstrom, the camp director, about her idea, and he thinks it’s a good one. However, when he suggests she form committees so she can get help with putting the newspaper together, Sheila refuses to do so, insisting that she wants to do everything on her own.
Sheila spends a couple days coming up with ideas for stories before she puts together the first edition of the newspaper. She begins typing up one of her stories at the camp office using an old typewriter. In the newer edition of the book I read, Mrs. Bindel, one of the camp workers, is using the computer Sheila originally intends on using, which may have been added into the story to explain why she is using a typewriter. However, because it takes her so long to type this out and she makes many mistakes while doing so, Mrs. Bindel suggests she handwrite the newspaper instead. She also tells her to use a stencil and a mimeograph machine because the copy machine is down.
Sheila is very confused as to what all this is, and she soon discovers it isn’t easy to write using a stencil, yet she somehow manages to get most of it done. But using the mimeograph machine turns out being the biggest challenge of all, because due to the special ink it uses, her hands end up full of ink when she uses the machine, and every page comes out blank because there isn’t enough ink. Mrs. Bindel ends up getting the machine going for her after a while, and the copies which are cranked out look much better than the first ones she’d put together. The newspaper is called Newsdate and Sheila addresses herself on it as “Sheila the Great”.
When Shelia hands out the newspaper to the other campers, Mouse tells her she’s never heard of a handwritten newspaper before. Sheila uses this as a moment of pride, saying “Anyone can type out a newspaper. It takes special talent and a lot more work to handwrite one!”. Later, two boys come up to her with their finished crossword puzzles, expecting some type of prize for their work. Sheila, who had forgotten to come up with what prizes to give the first people who complete her crossword puzzle, must come up with one right on the spot, and she tells them their reward will be running the camp newspaper for themselves next week! Her experience with the newspaper has her decide that the next time she puts together a big project, she’ll simply be the boss and have her committee do most of the work.
Meanwhile, Libby has a lot going on too. If she’s not developing a crush on one of the lifeguards at the pools, she is spending time with Jennifer, whom the family soon finds out will be having puppies. Unlike Sheila, she likes dogs and thinks the way Sheila acts around them is ridiculous. She also auditions for the camp production of Peter Pan. She’s determined to get the part of Wendy, and even has a hard time eating due to how nervous she is about it. However, she doesn’t end up getting the part, getting cast as Captain Hook instead, which she hates because she thinks the character is a disgusting old man. She starts feeling insecure about her appearance, making several comments to Sheila over how ugly she is and how Sheila herself should expect to become as ugly as she is once she turns thirteen.
The girl who does get the part of Wendy is Maryann Markman. Sheila notices that during rehearsals, she usually sings very well and does a good job with the role. However, whenever someone not involved in the play gets too close to her as she’s rehearsing, she sings much more softly. During the night of the performance, things go mostly well at first, with Maryann’s voice coming off as low but sweet. But after Libby comes up on stage and sings loudly, Maryann appears to have forgotten her lines and simply stands there on stage saying nothing. Because Sheila is doing work behind the set, she at first whispers Maryann’s lines to her and then says them out loud for the remainder of the play. Because she’s so focused on this, she doesn’t notice when Russ, the boy playing Peter Pan, runs through the archway, causing it to fall to the side. Despite how Libby gets upset with her over this, Sheila believes the play was still a success.
Later, Sheila has her first slumber party ever, for which she invites Mouse and Van Arden twins. Libby plans to have Maryann Markman, whom she’s now become friends with, over that same night, which Sheila thinks is unfair, but their mother says is fine because there’s plenty of room in the house for all of them. As a result, they all show up that Saturday night, with Mouse, Sondra, and Jane showing up not long after Maryann is there having dinner with the family.
When Sheila and her friends gather in her room, Mouse suggests they all create a Slam Book. In case you don’t know what a Slam Book is, they were basically the Burn Books of the 70s and 80s, where girls would often write nasty stuff about their classmates or friends. However, as Mouse and the other girls are discussing making them with Sheila, who in this edition is apparently unaware of what they are, they make them sound like fun ways to get to know what your friends really think of you. Mouse creates a sample list of traits the girls could comment on, which includes name, hair, face, body, brain, best thing, worst thing, and in general. The idea is for each one of the girls to go stand out in the hall while the other girls who remain in the room fill in the list to do an evaluation of whoever isn’t present. And once they’ve gone through everyone, they can read about themselves in private.
As you may have thought, this game of theirs doesn’t go according to plan. The sort of comments Sheila writes about Mouse include how she has a face that only a mother could love and that her body has too many scabs. As for the sort of comments Sheila gets, they’re just as bad. Her face is described as “ugly but loveable” and “gruesome”, her brain as “thinks it knows it all” and a “a mental”, while the worse thing about her is that she is “chicken” and “bossy”. Sheila is so offended by these comments that she wonders why she’d bothered invited them to her house in the first place.
The other girls don’t take their evaluations that well either. Sondra ends up in tears because of how all the girls described her as a fat slob, Jane hates how she’s described as not being able to keep secrets and having her brain turned off most of the time, while Mouse takes issue with the comments about her scabs and how her belly button sticks out. They get so mad that they start throwing Bobby Egran’s models at each other while still screaming and crying.
But of course, the fighting doesn’t go on forever. Libby comes into their room to check out what’s going on and gets hit by one of the models. She calls them little brats and tells them they’re too young to be having slumber parties and that she’s going to tell their parents, who’d gone out to buy pizza, what they’d done. As she rambles on, Sheila says, “Blah, blah, blah,”, and soon all the other girls are laughing and joining her in teasing Libby. This annoys Libby enough to leave them alone, but the girls know they must do something about the broken models, because otherwise Bobby might get Sheila the way he’s threatened to do so in his note.
They end up spending an hour repairing the models using glue and model paints, and by the time Sheila’s parents get home, they hide the remaining broken models and act as if everything is fine. As a result, her mom thinks Libby was just trying to give them a hard time and leaves them alone for the rest of the night.
And after this incident, Sheila does end up more willing to face her fears. She makes it through an evening hayride as part of camp, somehow manages to pass her final swimming test, and even reconsiders whether she’d want to own one of Jennifer’s puppies if it turns out being one that’s a much nicer than Peter Hatcher's.
…
I think the books in the Fudge series are among the funniest books I read as a kid. I remember getting the novel Double Fudge at a Scholastic book fair towards the end of third grade. I didn’t always have the best of luck during these events because as much as I liked them, a lot of the books I’d want would either be taken or were too expensive for me to buy. I often had more luck with the Scholastic book order forms that we’d get multiple times a year than through the fairs. I think that year I was on the lookout for one of the American Girl books but had not been able to get one of the only copies available for some reason, so I reluctantly bought Double Fudge, most likely because of the recommendation of a teacher or one of the book fair attendees. Being quite spoiled when it came to what books I wanted, I had already assumed I probably wouldn’t like it.
Of course, this turned out being a big mistake. I remember going through the book and getting to a part where Fudge writes about how much he loves money and thinking that it was hilarious. I managed to get through the whole book, which was about how Peter Hatcher’s family comes across some long- lost relatives, including two girls who go around singing songs like “The Best Things in Life Are Free” and a boy who acts a lot like Fudge. It was a very fun book, and much to my luck, we started reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing at the start of fourth grade. Strangely enough, we only read the first few chapters as a class, and then my teacher stopped reading it to the class for some reason. However, I went on to finish the book and take an Accelerated Reader (also known as AR) test on the book, which I recall doing well in. I also read the next two sequels, Superfudge and Fudge-A-Mania, all the way through within two or three months, and I enjoyed them almost as much as Double Fudge.
Now you may be wondering if I also read Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great around that time. The thing is, I checked out the book one or two times during the fourth grade and read the first couple of chapters, but I didn’t finish reading it. It wasn’t so much because I didn’t like the book rather than the fact that when I was a kid, I had the habit of not finishing about half of the books that I started reading. It could have been because I didn’t have enough time to finish reading them (back then, I wouldn’t renew books I checked out from the library), I had more interest in some other book I was trying to read at the same time, or maybe the books were too challenging for me to go through. But either way, despite loving to read, I couldn’t finish every book I read.
Having gotten through the book now as an adult, I still think it was just as fun a read as the other books in the Fudge series. As noted earlier, some of Judy Blume’s work tends to center around difficult issues (as is the case with Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and It’s Not the End of the World), which could make them a challenge for younger readers to get through, but books like this one are lighter in terms of theme and can serve for a good introduction to Blume’s novels for middle grade readers.
Do I think Sheila Tubman is as fun a character as Peter and Fudge Hatcher are? She can be at times. Reading about her going through some of her big plans with so much ambition while others are trying to get her to be more level-headed certainly felt relatable, since I tended to be the same way as a kid and can still act like this as an adult. Another thing that felt relatable was seeing how Sheila secretly had so many fears that got in the way of her confidence, to the point where having her spending the summer in the village where “The Legend of Sleepy Hallow” was set in feels very appropriate. While I can’t claim to have been afraid of swimming (in fact, I loved swimming as a kid, although I probably wasn’t the best swimmer around), I did have a complicated relationship with dogs. I went from loving them from a distance and wanting to own one at one point to getting uncomfortable around them after one dog of a family friend kept getting too close to me and attempted biting me when I was eleven. I think I like them more now, but I don’t know if I could handle owning one. I also went through periods where I was afraid of the dark, although it was nothing in comparison to my fear of loud noises. If I heard fireworks, thunder, or balloons popping, I tended to get just as freaked out as Sheila does throughout the book.
However, I do admit that some of the same things that make her seem relatable tend to come off as annoying at the same time. She certainly comes across as a little bossy at times, expecting her family and friends to follow through with her every demand. She also seems to be quite arrogant, thinking much too highly of herself and not wanting to accept help for even running a camp newspaper. I can’t think of a single person who could do something like this completely on their own, and yet Sheila seems to believe this would be the easiest thing in the world! And to top that off, she’s constantly lying to her friends about her fears, which shows that she’s much more insecure than she’s willing to admit to others. Perhaps it’s no wonder why she’s Peter Hatcher’s sworn enemy.
But as I said before, when I think about the ways in which I behaved similarly as she did when I was a kid, she comes off as less annoying and more of how you’d expect a girl of her age to act. At the age of ten, kids are learning much more about themselves and the world around them and because of this, they don’t want to think of themselves as simply little kids anymore, but rather older individuals who want to do much more than they might be allowed to do. If they experience any situation in which they feel insecure, whether it’s having to face a fear or being bullied by a classmate, they’ll get upset and feel as if they’ve failed to show the world how mature they are. Admitting to weaknesses can be very hard at that age, which would explain why Sheila is always trying to come across as much braver than she actually is.
Now if there’s one thing that really did annoy me about the book, it’s some of the changes that were made in the newer edition I read. Early in the book, Libby Tubman is listening to music through a CD player as she’s practicing her dancing. Obviously, in the older version of the book (which I managed to see for myself when I found an older copy of this book at Half Price Books about a week before writing this part of the review), she would have been playing music through a record player.
Yet in this same newer edition, Libby still calls her mom “mother”, which you rarely hear from teenagers these days. Likewise, Mouse’s family still gets deliveries from a milkman, which I’m pretty sure stopped being a thing by the nineties. And don’t even get me started on the Slam Book. As mean as little kids can be sometimes, I’m sure watching Mean Girls would have them think twice before creating anything resembling a Burn Book.
Of course, the most interesting changes came about when Sheila was trying to put the camp newspaper together. I do recall noticing how the book mentioned computers at some point when I was younger, and since I knew the book was originally published in 1972, I did have some questions as why they were brought up. Although computers did exist at the time and even got mentioned once in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (and I read that book through an older hardcover version), they would have only been available in certain professional environments in the early 70s, meaning there was no way any day camp in the country would have had access to one.
And as I expected, there was no mention of them in the older version I found of this book. Mrs Bindel apparently had no issue with Sheila using the office in that edition, so she’s simply using a typewriter without any comment on why she’s doing so. She still had difficulties with typing, but when she started using the mimeograph, she had no questions about what it was, as is the case in the newer edition.
As I said in my review of A Gift of Magic, I’d prefer it if authors wouldn’t make such updates to their books. Leaving older books as they were originally written can give children and teenagers a chance to truly experience the classics and learn more about the settings of these books and how things have changed since then. Not to mention that this can prevent confusion if a younger reader is to look at the original publication year and wonder why there are so many mentions of modern technology or concepts.
That aside, I still think Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great is among the many good children’s books of the 70s. Despite being written by a writer who was behind many of the changes we saw in books for younger readers of that decade, it still has a similar feel as a lot of older children’s books where the characters had a strong sense of adventure and imagination. It may have addressed the insecurities of its characters with more candor than older books did, but a lot of that old innocence and sense of fun is still there. And while some of the more serious novels of the time were still a welcome change, it’s nice to see that books like this were still out there and that they still manage to entertain readers decades later.