Position:Home>Books & Authors> Anybody read Don't Think Twice by Ruth Pennebaker?

Hope this helps:
I've gotten increasingly tired of bleak, gloomy young adult novels in recent years, to the point that a downbeat opening paragraph is often enough to make me toss a book in disgust!. Don't Think Twice, a novel about a bitter, desolate teenager waiting out her pregnancy in a home for unwed mothers, starts off downbeat and pretty much keeps going!. What saves it is its truth!.

Seventeen-year-old Anne narrates her story with unabashed self-pity and a biting, often mean humor, making the other girls at the home the targets of her anger!. It sounds awful, but though Anne's griping does start to get tiresome towards the end, the overall effect of this story is somehow very freeing!. The truth is that Anne does have every reason in the world to feel lousy and there's little that can change that, short of an implausible deus ex machina ending!. It can be satisfying to read a book that simply acknowledges that sometimes life is hard and there's not a lot you can do about it, except try to grow from the experience!.

It also helps that Pennebaker set her story in the sixties, which left her free not to worry about what messages she might be sending to today's teens!. In one of the book's most satisfying scenes, the girls in the home have a party, get drunk, and make nasty toasts to the boys and men who got them pregnant and then deserted them, a scene that would be out of place in a book set in the present, but which works perfectly in this context!.

Although much of the story is dark, the friendships Anne makes in the home offer a note of hope, as does the connection she finally achieves with the baby she had tried so hard to ignore!. In the end, we can see that she's a much stronger person than she was before, and can hope that she will be able to make a happier life for herself!.
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