Girls Like Us
by Randi PinkGenres: Young Adult Fiction / Girls & Women, Young Adult Fiction / People & Places / United States / African American & Black, Young Adult Fiction / Social Themes / Pregnancy
Published on October 29, 2019
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover Source: Library
In Girls Like Us, Randi Pink masterfully weaves four lives into a larger story–as timely as ever–about a woman’s right to choose her future.
Four teenage girls. Four different stories. What they all have in common is that they’re dealing with unplanned pregnancies.
It's the summer of 1972, before Roe v. Wade. In rural Georgia, Izella is wise beyond her years, but burdened with the responsibility of her older sister, Ola, who has found out she’s pregnant. Their young neighbor, Missippi, is also pregnant, but doesn’t fully understand the extent of her predicament. When her father sends her to Chicago to give birth, she meets the final narrator, Susan, who is white and the daughter of an anti-choice senator.
I picked up this book because I am in a book bingo group where one of the prompt was Book Set in the Decade You Were Born. I’m not generally interested in reading anything set in the 1970s. It just seems like a boring decade to me. But I picked this book and I’m glad I did.
The book follows four teenagers dealing with unplanned pregnancies just prior to Roe v Wade. One girl is the daughter of a Black southern female preacher who gossips about teenage girls who get pregnant. When her sister gets pregnant she knows they can’t tell her mother.
Their neighbor is pregnant after being sexually abused by an uncle. He told her not to tell her father so she refuses to talk about it to anyone.
One girl is the daughter of an anti-abortion Senator who is sent to a group home to give birth by her mother. She is trying to keep the Senator from finding her and forcing her into a marriage.
Overall, this book is pretty sad. No one has any control of what is going to happen to them. Their futures are bleak. There are different outcomes for each of the pregnant girls. It is a realistic look at the limited options available.
