March 15, 2013

Review: Love and Haight by Susan Carlton

Summary-
It’s 1971, and seventeen-year-old Chloe and her best friend MJ head to San Francisco to ring in the New Year. But Chloe has an ulterior motive—and a secret. She’s pregnant and has devised a plan not to be. In San Francisco’s flower-power heyday, it was (just about) legal to end her pregnancy.
 But as soon as the girls cross the Golden Gate, the scheme starts to unravel amid the bell bottoms, love-beads, and bongs. Chloe’s secrets escalate until she betrays everyone she cares about. MJ, who has grave doubts about Chloe’s plan. Her groovy aunt Kiki, who’s offered the girls a place to crash. Her self-absorbed mother meditating back in Phoenix. And maybe, especially, the boy she wishes she’d waited for.
 
                                                                         Review-
Young Chloe finds herself in a spot after having sex one time for fun and ʺneedsʺ an abortion. Her mother is very free-spirited and her father has left for good, so Chloe visits her aunt Kiki in San Francisco because abortion was legal in California.
I think the author has glamorized the 1970's in her mind and has put that feeling onto the pages of her book. She correctly shows Chloe as a liberated young woman, but a scared child at the same time, however the book falls short in showing the real atmosphere of the 70's. Having grown up there, I know it was an important time in our country's history, but I do not wish to relive it.
Women's rights were up-and-coming, but salaries for women were no where near what men made, as well as so many other examples of people's rights and lack thereof. It seems like she missed the point.
I am not sure the youth who read this book will understand the precarious nature of the freedoms depicted in it. Taking recreational drugs and having sex freely are not things that I remember doing in the 70's, and of the people that I know who did, many still pay the consequences or are dead.
If you need a quick read and have a liberal bend, you may enjoy the book. Try not to get sidetracked by the nudity and flagrant drug use.
 
Publisher-Henry Holt and Co
Reviewer Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by~Alisa Humphry(Librarian at Franklin High School)
Thank you to the Publisher for the donation of this book to the Read for your Future book program in exchange for a honest review~



 
 

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