Fudge-a-Mania
Fudge-a-Mania is a 1990 children's novel by Judy Blume and the fourth entry in the Fudge series.
Plot
is horrified to learn of his family's plans to spend summer in a vacation home alongside the Tubmans, the family of his archrival, Sheila, located in Southwest Harbor, Maine. On the other hand, his younger brother, Fudge, who is five years old, anticipates the vacation because of his plans to marry Sheila as a means of protection against the supposed "monsters" hiding beneath his bed, knowing that spouses often share one.This wish is dropped after a newfound friend named Mitzi Apfel provides Fudge with a bottle of her grandmother's "monster spray" during the vacation, but Peter is stunned to learn that she is the granddaughter of an idolized baseball player known as "Big Apfel".
Peter is allowed to invite his best friend, Jimmy Fargo, on the vacation with him, a privilege intended to compensate for having to spend it alongside Sheila; however, he becomes irritated when Jimmy starts to spend more time with her than with him out of sympathy for her own good friend's inability to join her on the vacation too, as she has the chicken pox.
Along the way, Peter develops a huge infatuation on a teenage librarian named Isobel and Fudge is inspired to write a picture book after learning about Mitzi's own, "Tell Me a Mitzi".
Jimmy's father, Frank, a celebrated painter, also receives inspiration after the Hatchers' baby daughter, Tootsie, toddles across a canvas with blue paint smeared on her feet, commencing a series of paintings appropriately entitled "Baby Feet".
Peter, Fudge, and Tootsie's widowed grandmother, Muriel, later marries Sheila's widowed grandfather, Buzzy Senior, much to Peter and Sheila's dismay, who thereafter pledged they would never stand each other, despite now being cousins-in-law.