Staff Writer
For years the Junie B. Jones book series has inspired a love of reading in young girls, and probably even some boys.
The young girl burst out of the pages of books starting with Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus in 1992 and, unfortunately, ending with the book Junie B. First Grader: Turkeys We Have Loved and Eaten (And other thankful stuff). The queen bee of first grade with an attitude to match her funky purple glasses has lost her author, Barbara Park.
Park, who was sixty-six, passed away on Friday after a long battle with ovarian cancer, Random House announced. Born in Mount Holly, N.J, Park was a trouble-maker who often found herself in the sorts of pickles Junie B. would be in. “I don’t have a problem being 6 years old in my head,” Park once said during an interview. “It’s almost embarrassing; if I’m talking to librarians or teachers who know my books and they say, ‘How do you do this?’ It’s not a stretch.”
Park credited “The Catcher in the Rye” as an early influence on her as well as Judy Blume who people would often think was Junie B. (the ‘B’ stands for Beatrice: ‘Only I don’t like Beatrice. I just like B and that’s all,” Junie would often warn). “I’m Judy B. and lot of kids just assumed I was Junie B. Jones and had written the books,” Blume told The Associated Press. “I’d always say, ‘I didn’t write them, but I wish I had.’”
Park’s books have sold 55 million copies just in North America and Junie B. was adapted into a musical. Often, the books would cause families and children to smile and laugh but a few didn’t like the madcap, ungrammatical, no nonsense Junie B. took on things. As a result, the book series has appeared on the American Library Association of “challenged” books.
Despite being an author for nearly twenty years, Parks never did write an adult novel, saying that she was “not actually sure [she’s] grown-up enough for grown-up books.” She is survived by her husband and two sons. She founded the Sisters in Survival charity for women with ovarian cancer. Random House has stated that you can make donations to her foundations through this website: www.sistersinsurvival.org
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