Teen pregnancy
Feb. 3rd, 2008 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Working as a middle school teacher, teen (and preteen) pregnancy is something I've encountered both in the classroom -- though the seventh grade girl in question managed to snow ALL the teachers at my school for her entire pregnancy, by wearing a puffy down jacket all year -- and heard about after the fact. It has rarely seemed as benign and sweet as Juno, though I liked the movie a lot. However. A friend recently wrote me asking for book recommendations on teen pregnancy and self esteem, more or less. I found myself with a weird juxtaposition of books. Here is what came to mind:
From the 1960s (books I read, over and over, as a teenager) (um, in the early 1980s)
Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones is about class divisions and teen pregnancy in the South in the 1960s. The author is Ann Head, and the book was published in 1968, though the counterculture touches only very lightly on this novel. An upper-middle class white girl from an old, genteel Southern family is rebelliously going out with a working class jock -- the aforenamed Bo Jo Jones -- from very much the wrong side of the tracks. She gets pregnant. They drive across state lines to Alabama, I think, and get married, and then try to be married as teenagers. It's actually a complicated book about class and gender expectations of the time. It wouldn't be at all useful for the purpose my friend wanted.
There is also a trilogy by one of my preferred British young adult fiction authors -- K. M. Peyton, better known for her horse-and-girl books, and her Flambards books -- which deals with the same sort of middle class girl, working class boy, unintended pregnancy, then marriage scenario. The first book is called (depending on whether it is the British or American imprint) Pennington's Last Term, or Pennington's Seventeenth Summer. The sequel is Pennington's Heir, and the last is The Beethoven Medal. Pennington is the scruffy working class lout with horrible parents who, nonetheless, in the form of a horrible mother, push him to take private piano lessons because he is a prodigy. One of the jewels of early scenes is him, in school, forced to play for school assembly, and knowing that "O Tannenbaum" drives the master wild because it is also the tune for "The Workers' Flag is Deepest Red", or one of the tunes for it, and thus a Communist song which he plays over and over. Ruth is a horsy girl (I think she has another book of her own, prior to her fate as a pregnant teenager) who falls for Pennington and gets knocked up just after he's released from Borstal. These books are very good about repressed and also dark and unsure emotions. The tone is very, very well done. Their trials and frustrations and temptations and problems are realistic and compelling. Again, however, not really suited to 2008 and West Oakland.
Imani All Mine, by Connie Porter (bizarrely, she is also the author of the American Girl "Addy" books) is closer to the mark, although I thought the ending kind of spiralled out of drama into melodrama. The teenage mother in this book is black, fifteen, and living in Buffalo, New York. The setting is the mid 1990s. She has a daughter she has named Imani, which means Faith. And she covered up her pregnancy much the way my student did. The story deals with the very difficult theme of rape, and, as I say, spins out, at the end. I am also unclear about how the entrance of storefront evangelical Christianity worked with the plot, although obviously the daughter's name makes that link, too. The book is written in urban black English, and is fairly consistent and not patronizing in that. I've read much, much worse, usually when attempted by whitey -- Marilyn Levy comes forcibly to mind. Connie Porter, according to Wikipedia, grew up in public housing in Lackawanna, New York, thus knowing of what she writes.
But the book that I think is the best of these is one by Rita Garcia Williams called Like Sisters on the Homefront, which is also written in urban black English. Williams wrote two related books about teenage friends in Queens, NY. One is part of another sort of African-American YAF girls' subgenre, as it involves dance -- I can think of at least four such books off hand. That one is called Blue Tights.
In Like Sisters on the Homefront, the main character, Gayle, is a fourteen or fifteen year old girl who has a one year old son, and, in the opening paragraphs of the book, is caught by her mother in the bathroom, throwing up from morning sickness. Where this book departs from the usual after school specials (as Imani All Mine also differs from them) is that Gayle is treated as an agent and the functioning mother of her son. Unlike Imani All Mine or any other YAF book on this subject that I've seen, in the next paragraph of the book, Gayle's mother has hauled her down to the local clinic and scheduled an abortion. I have read this book aloud at least three times in middle school classes. Once I was reading this section, on the abortion, aloud in front of an Oakland district administrator. She walked in while I was already reading, on a surprise visit. That was fun. She was dubious, but admitted to being impressed by how students reacted.
Anyway, Like Sisters on the Homefront is also an unusual book because it treats one of the common themes in black communities -- at least in Oakland -- of parents sending their children back to their Southern relatives once they've been exposed to trauma or trouble. Gayle's enforced exile to Georgia and her preacher Uncle Luther and very churchfolk aunt and cousin Cookie, and especially her dying Great-grandmother, Great, is wonderful and incredibly touching. Difficult. Full of ambivalence and resistance. But deeply emotional. I am usually in tears, in class, by the end, and not manipulated ones. I highly recommend this book; it's one of my very favorites.
PS: after writing this, I thought of another 60s classic: Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room, which is unwed late teenage pregnancy in London. It's very good, though again, not anything my friend could use.
From the 1960s (books I read, over and over, as a teenager) (um, in the early 1980s)
Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones is about class divisions and teen pregnancy in the South in the 1960s. The author is Ann Head, and the book was published in 1968, though the counterculture touches only very lightly on this novel. An upper-middle class white girl from an old, genteel Southern family is rebelliously going out with a working class jock -- the aforenamed Bo Jo Jones -- from very much the wrong side of the tracks. She gets pregnant. They drive across state lines to Alabama, I think, and get married, and then try to be married as teenagers. It's actually a complicated book about class and gender expectations of the time. It wouldn't be at all useful for the purpose my friend wanted.
There is also a trilogy by one of my preferred British young adult fiction authors -- K. M. Peyton, better known for her horse-and-girl books, and her Flambards books -- which deals with the same sort of middle class girl, working class boy, unintended pregnancy, then marriage scenario. The first book is called (depending on whether it is the British or American imprint) Pennington's Last Term, or Pennington's Seventeenth Summer. The sequel is Pennington's Heir, and the last is The Beethoven Medal. Pennington is the scruffy working class lout with horrible parents who, nonetheless, in the form of a horrible mother, push him to take private piano lessons because he is a prodigy. One of the jewels of early scenes is him, in school, forced to play for school assembly, and knowing that "O Tannenbaum" drives the master wild because it is also the tune for "The Workers' Flag is Deepest Red", or one of the tunes for it, and thus a Communist song which he plays over and over. Ruth is a horsy girl (I think she has another book of her own, prior to her fate as a pregnant teenager) who falls for Pennington and gets knocked up just after he's released from Borstal. These books are very good about repressed and also dark and unsure emotions. The tone is very, very well done. Their trials and frustrations and temptations and problems are realistic and compelling. Again, however, not really suited to 2008 and West Oakland.
Imani All Mine, by Connie Porter (bizarrely, she is also the author of the American Girl "Addy" books) is closer to the mark, although I thought the ending kind of spiralled out of drama into melodrama. The teenage mother in this book is black, fifteen, and living in Buffalo, New York. The setting is the mid 1990s. She has a daughter she has named Imani, which means Faith. And she covered up her pregnancy much the way my student did. The story deals with the very difficult theme of rape, and, as I say, spins out, at the end. I am also unclear about how the entrance of storefront evangelical Christianity worked with the plot, although obviously the daughter's name makes that link, too. The book is written in urban black English, and is fairly consistent and not patronizing in that. I've read much, much worse, usually when attempted by whitey -- Marilyn Levy comes forcibly to mind. Connie Porter, according to Wikipedia, grew up in public housing in Lackawanna, New York, thus knowing of what she writes.
But the book that I think is the best of these is one by Rita Garcia Williams called Like Sisters on the Homefront, which is also written in urban black English. Williams wrote two related books about teenage friends in Queens, NY. One is part of another sort of African-American YAF girls' subgenre, as it involves dance -- I can think of at least four such books off hand. That one is called Blue Tights.
In Like Sisters on the Homefront, the main character, Gayle, is a fourteen or fifteen year old girl who has a one year old son, and, in the opening paragraphs of the book, is caught by her mother in the bathroom, throwing up from morning sickness. Where this book departs from the usual after school specials (as Imani All Mine also differs from them) is that Gayle is treated as an agent and the functioning mother of her son. Unlike Imani All Mine or any other YAF book on this subject that I've seen, in the next paragraph of the book, Gayle's mother has hauled her down to the local clinic and scheduled an abortion. I have read this book aloud at least three times in middle school classes. Once I was reading this section, on the abortion, aloud in front of an Oakland district administrator. She walked in while I was already reading, on a surprise visit. That was fun. She was dubious, but admitted to being impressed by how students reacted.
Anyway, Like Sisters on the Homefront is also an unusual book because it treats one of the common themes in black communities -- at least in Oakland -- of parents sending their children back to their Southern relatives once they've been exposed to trauma or trouble. Gayle's enforced exile to Georgia and her preacher Uncle Luther and very churchfolk aunt and cousin Cookie, and especially her dying Great-grandmother, Great, is wonderful and incredibly touching. Difficult. Full of ambivalence and resistance. But deeply emotional. I am usually in tears, in class, by the end, and not manipulated ones. I highly recommend this book; it's one of my very favorites.
PS: after writing this, I thought of another 60s classic: Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room, which is unwed late teenage pregnancy in London. It's very good, though again, not anything my friend could use.