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.In rural Georgia, Izella is wise beyond her years, but burdened with the responsibility of her older sister, Ola, who has found out … 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.
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Girls Like Us was a masterpiece that weaved the stories of four girls dealing with unexpected pregnancies in the summer of 1972. This story follows two sisters, Ola and Izella. and two strangers, Missippi and Sue, as they try to deal with matters that no teenager should ever have to deal with. This was such a moving and timely story that I read in one sitting as once I started reading, I could not put it down. This book sucks you in from the first page and the fact that it tells three different stories made me continue to read and wondering what was next for these characters. I liked the references to The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison since Girls Like Us was reminiscent of that book and explored some of the same topics.
Ola and Izella were sisters living in rural Georgia with their evangelist mother who ran a small church out of their house. Ola is sixteen and Izella is only fifteen, but seems to be the more mature one out of the two of them. When they find out Ola is pregnant, Izella seems to take it on her shoulders to figure out what to do and Ola is reliant on her. She wants to help her sister and doesn’t want their mother to find out about it. In that same town, a fourteen-year-old named Missippi is also pregnant but she doesn’t seem to understand the magnitude of that. She really is a sweet, innocent girl who is left home by herself entirely too often for how young she is. The last girl is seventeen-year-old Sue who is from an affluent family. She finds out she is pregnant and goes to her mother immediately who has a solution for how they will deal with it.
All these girls are understandably scared and in over their head with this problem. When Missippi’s father finds out she’s pregnant. she is sent to Chicago to live with a woman who takes in pregnant girls, taking care of them and helping them deliver when the time comes. Sue is sent to this same apartment by her mother. Sue and Missippi bond immediately and become fast friends, while for Izella and Ola, they figure out a way to take care of the pregnancy without their mother ever finding out. The story progresses from there giving background about how each of these girls ended up pregnant and the bonds that are formed during hard times.
Missippi was my absolutely favourite character. I thought her story was the most heartbreaking when first learning of it and how she became pregnant. She was the sweetest, innocent fourteen-year-old who you just wanted to wrap up in your arms and never let go. It was clear from the start that her story was tragic or that was the feeling I got when I started reading her chapter. She was such a pure character who still maintained her innocence despite the things she’d endured in her short life. She grew considerably after giving birth and I liked that as well. Sue was my next favourite character because she was outspoken and she did not take no crap from anybody. She knew what she wanted in her life and she stood for something even if it was contradictory to her senator father’s views. The way she took to Missippi endeared her to me even more. Ola and Izella… their story was very complicated. The pregnancy created a rift in their once close relationship and they were never able to repair it. They were both entirely too young to deal with something of this magnitude on their own but they did not realise that until it was too late.
The ending of this book was amazing and I loved seeing the ‘now’ with all the characters. It was great to see where the girls’ lives ended up after dealing with their pregnancies. Showing the great-granddaughter of one of the women and the ruling that was handed down in the beginning of that chapter, brought everything into prospective. Girls Like Us was so well written and had strong characters that you couldn’t help but connect, cry and hurt with.
Girls Like Us was powerful, heartbreaking, and a book that will always stick with me for the rest of my days. Randi Pink did a magnificent job of telling each girls’ story and making you see every angle and argument people may have about women’s rights to choose. It is a book that needed to be written and I am happy and honoured I was able to read and review a copy of this book.
*Published on The Nerd Daily’s website.*