Book Reviews

Review: Girls Like Us by Randi Park

Girls Like Us is an emotional book that will make your heart wrench. Emotional, hard hitting, and powerful Girls Like Us will stick with you long after you finish. For anyone who wants to read a book that examines unplanned pregnancy for girls, the necessity for pro-choice legislature, and the necessity of telling your story.

Summary

Set in the summer of 1972, this moving YA historical novel is narrated by teen girls from different backgrounds with one thing in common: Each girl is dealing with pregnancy.
Four teenage girls. Four different stories. What they all have in common is that they’re dealing with unplanned pregnancies.

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.

Review

(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)

TW: incest, rape

I fail to have the right words to describe the power and emotion in Girls Like Us. It’s a story about the legacy of women, girls, with unplanned pregnancy. Their fears, doubts, compromises, love, and sacrifices. This multiple perspective book features the stories of four girls united by the impact of unplanned pregnancy on their lives. Faced with choices, responsibilities, and shame Pink tells delivers a book full of emotions ranging from rage to fear to sadness to doubt.

Girls Like Us revolves around the bond these girls feel to each other – to all that came before them and will come after them – the girls that suffer under the shame and responsibility of unplanned pregnancy. The ones who are pregnant and have no where to go. How it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, white or black, how your world doesn’t really stay the same no matter who you are. Girls Like Us not only looks at the options these girls are faced with, but also the conditions of their pregnancy.

Overall,

A whole legacy of girls like them. Of all the ways society tucks women away, silences their histories and their pasts. Girls Like Us is also a wishful book – about the mothers and fathers we wish we had. The support that is denied to us. The future we wish was open to us. It’s a story about the need to tell our truth, to resist in our small ways, to assert our individuality when we can. In many ways, Girls Like Us breaks your heart over and over again – whether it be with the emotional reveals or even it’s hopefulness. It is a must-read!

Find Girls Like Us on Goodreads, Amazon, Indiebound & The Book Depository.

Discussion

What is your favorite feminist book? In terms of YA books I also loved Watch Us Rise.


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