Girls Like Us by Randi Pink
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. Randi Pink masterfully weaves four lives into a larger story – as timely as ever – about a woman’s right to choose her future.
A devastating, heartfelt story about the far-reaching effects of legislating female bodies. Randi Pink’s characters slowly but surely found their way into my consciousness, so that I often found myself wondering how they were doing, like old friends. The choice to ground the story in historical fiction and then bring us to the near future with the gut-punching final chapters is brilliant. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a long time.
Our Year in Love and Parties by Karen Hattrup Summary: Tucker knows that some relationships take work. With his best friend, Bobby, and his mom, everything is simple, steady. His dad, on the other hand, seems to only show up when he wants to bring Tucker down. Then there’s Erika Green, who comes back into his life, stirring up old feelings. A small part of him knows he shouldn’t get too attached during senior year. But a bigger part doesn’t want her to disappear again. Erika from before the video loved to shock people. Now, she just wants to hole up in her quiet college life and leave the past where it belongs—in a dumpster fire. But then she reconnects with Tucker Campanelli. Erika can’t explain what it is about him. There’s just this undeniable connection between them, and she really doesn’t want to lose that feeling. Not yet.
To be honest, I am not a party person. Whenever I see one of those rom-coms where people are dancing on tables or playing beer pong, I cringe – because the idea of being around a big group of people, most of them drunk, is not now and never has been my idea of fun. But Karen Hattrup’s new novel, Our Year in Love and Parties, goes far beyond the “party night” tropes of teen books and movies to explore the evolving relationship of its two main characters – the sensitive Tucker and the jaded Erika. It’s a clever device, to set the story up in parties on four nights throughout the year (end of summer, Christmas, spring, and the end of the school year), but by drawing on the ebb and flow of teenage lives, Hattrup’s sensitive portrayal goes much deeper than the calendar. Though Erika and Tucker’s relationship is the throughline of the story, we see it in context of the myriad other relationships swirling around the two of them – complicated family dynamics, friendships made and lost and repaired, romances and hookups and everything in between. (And Hattrup excels at creating lovable, memorable side characters who make me wish they each had a starring role in their own novels.) Like Hattrup’s debut, the excellent, lyrical Frannie and Tru, Our Year in Love and Parties captures the sense of fleeting magic in adolescence, when everything is changing but the possibilities are endless.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston Summary: What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales? When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. True love isn’t always diplomatic.
It’s rare that I bother to review adult fiction books, but this one was so delightful that I had to! Everything about this book just sucked me in and kept me reading late into the night, rooting for Alex and Henry and their unlikely romance. I loved those two adorably geeky cinnamon rolls (I mean, come on, they write each other emails quoting great love letters by historical figures!). I loved all of the secondary characters, especially June and Nora, and the way all the messy, intertwined relationships fueled the plot. And, let’s be real, the alternate reality aspect wherein the appearance of unethical behavior in the White House might actually make a candidate lose votes was refreshing. I read this book while on vacation, in great gulps, and it was everything my exhausted, embittered soul needed. It’s more than a compelling story; this book, right now, is downright therapeutic.
I did a lot of reading over the summer, but I am a little behind on my reviewing! Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing my reviews of my favorite recent reads. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. First up: a feminist YA read that pairs nicely with my most recent book, She Spoke: 14 Women Who Raised Their Voices and Changed the World:
Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu Summary: Vivian Carter is fed up. Fed up with her small-town Texas high school that thinks the football team can do no wrong. Fed up with sexist dress codes and hallway harassment. But most of all, Viv Carter is fed up with always following the rules. Viv’s mom was a punk rock Riot Grrrl in the ’90s, so now Viv takes a page from her mother’s past and creates a feminist zine that she distributes anonymously to her classmates. She’s just blowing off steam, but other girls respond. Pretty soon Viv is forging friendships with other young women across the divides of cliques and popularity rankings, and she realizes that what she has started is nothing short of a girl revolution.
I loved this book! Vivian was a such a fully-fleshed out character, with all the hopes and fears and internalized insecurities of a girl growing up in small-town America. I loved the way Viv was inspired by the zines of her mom’s Riot Grrrl past, but what I loved best about this book was how it showed that all it takes is one voice, one spark to bring out the light in others. Viv may be the one writing and distributing the Moxie zine, but the movement she starts soon develops a life of its own, and it doesn’t belong to her, or to any of the individual girls who start speaking up – it belongs to all of them, together, and what they have created is bigger than any one person or single action. Inspiring, empowering, and downright fun, Moxie is a must-read.
This writing thing can really knock you on your butt sometimes. Twice this year I got caught up in the maelstrom of negative thoughts, putting so much pressure on myself that I pushed myself to the brink of an abyss of anxiety.
Why does this happen? I suspect it’s different for every writer, but for me it’s because I get caught up in the myth that it’s somehow easy for other people, and if I just push through and push through, somehow it will become easy for me too. But the thing is that making art is hard, even if it doesn’t look it from the outside. But even that thought didn’t help as I was driving toward the abyss last month, because I’d just tell myself that it was hard but that I should somehow be able to just get over it all and do it anyway.
And then a newsletter arrived in my mailbox, from my friend Steph Lagana, a lighthouse in the world, and it told me exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it:
“And this is really important, DON’T DO IT BEFORE IT FEELS RIGHT. It doesn’t need to feel easy. In fact it could be really simple and feel SUPER @#$%&*$ SCARY. See above. It also doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to feel RIGHT.”
And I suddenly understood why everything felt wrong with the writing project I had been working on. Even though I loved the story, the characters, the premise, I was trying to do it at the wrong time. I had been trying to write with an empty pen.
Earlier this year, I reread an old favorite with my son, The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg. One of the characters, Noah, learns calligraphy, and one of the most important lessons he learns is this:
“Filling the pen is not what you do before you begin. It is the beginning.”
(My Sugar Quill people will appreciate the fact that this bit of wisdom appears on page 87.)
My head knew this; I even had several conversations about it with other authors back in October. Yet still I pushed myself, trying to force this book into existence. It wasn’t until I was at my wit’s end that I finally understood this with my heart and decided to take time off from writing altogether.
When I made that decision, it was like a weight had been lifted from my lungs. And I realized the utter ridiculousness of the fear that had been driving my push forward: I was afraid that if I really took a break from writing, somehow I would never be able to start again. This is ludicrous. I have finished six novel manuscripts and nine nonfiction manuscripts; I’ve done it before and I can do it again. And yet the fear persists, every single time. The irony is that there was no way I could find my way back to writing until I let go of it for awhile.
So now I am focusing on the things that inspire me, so that, when the time is right, I can go back to that work in progress with joy and vigor. Here are some of the things that have been filling my pen lately:
Because any list of what inspires me naturally has to include Harry Potter, and this is the one my son and I are currently listening to. On this listen, I am especially appreciating how well Narcissa Malfoy’s storyline is developed.
Also a staple of my inspiration. You can’t be uncheered by Fraggle Rock. Here’s one of my very favorite clips. It always inspires me, so maybe it will inspire you too:
Girls Like Us by Randi Pink
Earlier this year, I reread an old favorite with my son, 
Stories By Hand with Kathy MacMillan 