Title: Girls Like Us
Author: Randi Pink
Genre: YA, historical
Rating: 3 out of 5
Georgia, 1972.
Izella and her sister Ola do everything just as their mother, a very religious woman, tells them. Cooking, cleaning, serving…and most of all, staying out of trouble and not getting pregnant. Except Ola didn’t listen to that last one, and now Izella must get her out of trouble somehow.
Their neighbor, Missippi, is also pregnant, through no fault of her own—and she’s too young to understand what the ramifications are. When her father sends her to Chicago to a woman who will take care of her until she has the babies, she meets Sue, also pregnant and the daughter of a pro-life senator.
Four different girls. Four different stories. All facing the same issue.
This book was not what I thought it would be. It’s rougher than I would like not, not fully polished, and while it’s about an emotional topic, I never felt an emotional connection with any of the characters. I found Izella and Ola basically unlikable, although I did like Missippi and Sue. The sisters’ choices show their ignorance of reality—perhaps due to their almost-cloistered upbringing—while Missippi is a character I felt sorry for, making the best of a horrible situation. Sue, on the other hand, is full of great motives, but zero follow-through. She talks a good game, but her rebellion vanishes in the face of opposition.
Randi Pink lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Girls Like Us is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of Feiwel & Friends via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.)
Tomorrow Is Another Day 
I like this book’s cover art, but I don’t tend to like books that are really political (like the writer was falling over themselves to write a usually left-wing take on a cutting-edge topic.) I read a wonderful YA book by Gail Giles a while back called ‘Girls Like Us’ and it annoys me for some reason that they’re using the title again and again lately. Great review! 🙂
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Thanks! This book was supposedly about rebellion and Roe vs. Wade, but really, the girls all did exactly what was expected of them, so the opposite of what it was portrayed to be about.
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