Below is the complete list of Judy Blume’s BFF books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of BFF Books
About BFF
Judy Blume’s BFF series consists of two closely connected middle-grade novels about friendship, family upheaval, growing independence, and the emotional complications of early adolescence. Just as Long as We’re Together tells the story primarily through Stephanie Hirsch, while Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson shifts the perspective to Stephanie’s longtime best friend Rachel. The books were later collected together as BFF: Just As Long As We’re Together / Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson, emphasizing their status as companion stories about the same group of friends.
Just as Long as We’re Together begins as Stephanie enters seventh grade already dealing with significant changes. Her family has moved, her body is changing, and her parents are concealing problems in their marriage. One familiar constant is Rachel, Stephanie’s best friend since second grade. Their comfortable two-person friendship changes when Alison Monceau moves into the neighborhood.
Stephanie immediately likes Alison, who is friendly and surprisingly unaffected despite being the daughter of a famous actress. She assumes that adding another person to the friendship will simply make things better. Rachel is less comfortable with the new arrangement. What follows is not a dramatic feud between an obvious villain and victim, but a recognizable examination of how friendships change when three people have different expectations of closeness.
Blume gives Stephanie flaws that make the conflict more believable. She can be jealous of Rachel’s intelligence and accomplishments even while loving her, and she sometimes interprets Rachel’s behavior without understanding the pressure Rachel places on herself. Rachel, meanwhile, feels increasingly displaced as Stephanie and Alison develop their own easy connection. Misunderstandings accumulate because each girl is reacting not only to the friendship but to private problems the others cannot fully see.
Family change runs alongside the friendship story. Stephanie learns that her parents have separated, information they initially keep from her while her father spends increasing amounts of time away from home. Her anger about their secrecy affects how she responds to Rachel and Alison. Growing up, the novel suggests, involves discovering that parents and friends can care deeply while still withholding things, making mistakes, or failing to recognize what someone else needs.
Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson retells this social world from Rachel’s perspective rather than simply continuing Stephanie’s narration. Rachel appears exceptionally capable from the outside: she earns excellent grades, plays music, joins activities, and continually tries to improve herself. Inside her family, however, that competence has become another source of pressure.
The major disruption is the return of Rachel’s older brother Charles after he is expelled from boarding school. Charles is intelligent, angry, confrontational, and skilled at provoking everyone around him. His presence destabilizes a household Rachel wants desperately to keep orderly. Her older sister Jessica has difficulties of her own, while Rachel increasingly assumes that being responsible means solving problems that may not actually be hers to solve.
Stephanie and Alison remain important, but seeing them through Rachel’s eyes changes the meaning of the friendship established in the first book. Rachel’s tendency toward perfection and overcommitment becomes clearer, as does the insecurity beneath behavior Stephanie sometimes misunderstood. Her interest in older student Jeremy Dragon provides another complication as she begins exploring feelings beyond the familiar safety of her closest friendships.
The two books work especially well together because neither girl receives complete authority over their shared story. Stephanie and Rachel can both feel hurt while understanding events differently. That shift in viewpoint gives the BFF series its lasting insight: friendship is not preserved by never changing, never feeling jealous, or never disappointing one another. It survives when people learn that closeness can expand, identities can develop separately, and even best friends will sometimes experience the same relationship in entirely different ways.