Girls in Trouble: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Caroline Leavitt (Author) "Sara's pain are coming ten minutes apart now..." (more)
Key Phrases: adoption lawyer, open adoption, Caroline Lea, New York, Danny Slade (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Leavitt's uneven but earnest eighth novel examines the emotional price a bright Massachusetts teen pays when she chooses "open" adoption for a baby she gives birth to at 16. It's 1987, and smart Sara Rothman has fallen in love with "black sheep" Danny Slade. When he vanishes after learning she's pregnant, Sara gives the baby up. Leavitt (Coming Back to Me) poignantly depicts the consequences of that choice for everyone concerned: Sara, who misses her baby and Danny both; Abby and Jack, Sara's well-meaning parents; Danny, the young father; George and Eva Rivers, the attentive but naive adoptive couple; and Anne, the child. At first, Sara visits the Riverses daily-she loves Anne, and the Riverses had cared for her while she was pregnant. But her presence becomes intrusive, and eventually, Eva takes a stand: "We adopted Anne," she tells Sara. "We didn't adopt you." Sara then makes a desperate attempt to steal the infant, and when she's found, the Riverses move and deny Sara visiting rights ("Open adoptions are only enforceable in Oregon," a lawyer tells her). Fifteen years pass, and Leavitt's focus wavers; a fuzzy reunion between Danny and Sara is particularly unconvincing. The novel's portrait of dreamy, adolescent Anne and her relationship with the older Riverses is sharper, as is the realistic, bumpy reunion of birth mother and daughter. An unflinching depiction of maternal need and the dynamics of adoption, this tale is a sharp reminder of the importance of honesty in life decisions.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post

Caroline Leavitt is a columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of eight novels, including her addictive newest, Girls in Trouble. Leavitt's books are often praised for being readable, but sometimes this commendation can sound like faint praise, as if being readable, like being charming, is not a serious attribute. We like "readable," but maybe we don't respect it -- it is, perhaps, the literary equivalent of potato chips or ice cream. To dismiss novels that are readable as inherently lightweight, however, is a mistake. "Literature," said Iris Murdoch, "is meant to be grasped by enjoyment."

The success of Girls in Trouble is that it is both a page-turner and also a canny portrait of the trouble perfectly ordinary people can get into while trying to satisfy their perfectly ordinary needs for love and security and happiness. The pleasure of this novel, our "enjoyment" of it, comes from Leavitt's wisdom about the deep chasm of misfortune, her exploration of misfortune's steep slope and her recognition that climbing out of misfortune's pit, step by arduous step, requires a heroism that literature, with its capacity for rendering the elevated quality of ordinary experience, can portray so beautifully.

Sara Rothman is the beloved only child of Abby and Jack. She is lovely to look at, she's been raised to be decent and ambitious, and she's smart -- bound for Harvard, she and her parents hope. But she's not smart enough; or rather, she's just human enough to fall in love with a boy and discover herself pregnant at 16. Young love is dangerous territory for writers -- a potential minefield of clichés -- but Leavitt handles Sara and Danny's infatuation with dignity and tenderness. "He kissed her stomach, her knees, knobby as teacups, her feet, her hair. She had never had a real boyfriend before. She wasn't quite sure what to do, where to put her hands, her legs, her mouth. 'Wait,' she said.' "

The young occasionally possess good instincts that adults, with all their experience, cannot appreciate. It is too late for an abortion, and Sara, guided by her heart and against her parents' wishes, chooses a set of parents for her baby. Together they decide on an open adoption; at first, everything about George and Eva heartens Sara, who is desperately in need of heartening. Their house is filled with light and sunshine and comfortable old chairs and Oriental rugs. Sara and Eva bake bread together, share books, laugh and talk. "Eva and George wouldn't let her lift a finger, even though she told them it was good for her to be active, though the truth was she just wanted to be so busy, she wouldn't think about what was happening to her. Eva had cooked her huge, elaborate, healthy meals. . . . George was always popping into the car to pick up whatever it was she had a yen for. Chocolate ice cream. Ginger tea. Soft slippers in size six because her feet hurt."

Along with their good instincts, the young are also possessed of bad judgment, however, and Sara does one very foolish thing. Eva and George, smitten with their new baby and overwhelmed by the task of parenting, grow impatient with Sara's dependence on them. But Sara, desperate to discover a role for herself in the altered universe of being a teenage mother, rather than a normal high school student, kidnaps her baby. That act, and everything that follows from it, begins the harrowing span of years that Leavitt, in her wisdom, understands as the truth about misfortune: It's rarely over and done with quickly. Socked-in misery is familiar territory for literature, and Leavitt gives us the years following Sara's moment of bad judgment -- and all the consequences that follow from that bad judgment -- with patience and understanding.

Sara grows up, as does her baby, as do Danny, and George and Eva, and Sara's parents, Abby and Jack. Their collective reconciliation, when it comes, is as fraught with difficulty as was their estrangement. It is no small accomplishment to portray the lives of decent people and their poor choices in such a way that we continue to care about what happens to them; the arc of their conflict, like so many conflicts in life, is deceptively uneventful. Only a patient novelist understands the pleasure -- and the suspense -- of moving towards this slow and modest conclusion. The characters in Girls in Trouble are blazingly knowable, and it is Leavitt's sympathy that gives her novel both its page-turning momentum and its dignity.

Reviewed by Carrie Brown

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (January 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312271220
• ISBN-13: 978-0312271220
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #542,344 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding!, January 3, 2004

By	M.J. Rose "mjroseauthor" (Greenwich, Ct USA) - See all my reviews

Caroline Leavitt -the author of this book is one girl who is not in trouble. Her sensitive portrayal of a birth mother and an adoptive mother and the tragedy and escasty of what brings them together and then drives them apart is an outstanding accomplishment. Managing to never dismiss or diminish the emotions of any of the so true to life characters in this novel, Leavitt keeps the reader engrossed and caring, and at least for this reader, occassionally crying.

Leavitt, author of seven previous novels, wings her way effortlessly through a laybrinth of emotion that never gets cloying as it illuminates the conflicts of the human heart.

Well done. A breakout novel if there ever was one.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A full circle filled with hope for two "girls in trouble", mother and daughter, October 14, 2006

By	Lilly Flora "by Lilo Drandoff" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Girls in Trouble: A Novel (Paperback)

You would think that a book on the subject of a troubled open adoption would be terribly depressing, but even though I was going through issues while reading this book for the first time three years ago, it isn't. There is something remarkably hopeful and uplifting in this book, a kind of sense that love really is timeless and all encompassing and there is always hope in the end for a good result. You don't have to be a sixteen year old with a baby to get the message of this book.

This book is a story about a young girl named Sara, who is smart, bookish and shy. And then she meets Danny, who is everything she is not. Incredibly, he loves her. But as soon as the two 15 year olds find out that she is pregnant, everything goes to hell. Danny disappears and Sara is left too pregnant for an abortion with her parents, who only want for her to give up the baby for adoption and move on with her brilliant life and plans.

Here come in Eva and George, two loving, caring, people in their forties who want a baby and cannot have one. So they decide to adopt. During Sara's pregnancy they are everything her parents are not. Supportive and kind they become a kind of extra-parent set for Sara. But as soon as her baby, Anne, is born, things change. Eva and George want time with their baby, but Sara can't stop loving her child, or the adoptive parents. Soon this escalates to jealousy, confrontation, fighting, and a decision that changes five lives forever. The "girls in trouble" of the title refers not only to the old saying used for pregnant teens in the 50's, but to the consequences of the decision on Sara and Anne.

The plot sounds depressing and sad and a little hopeless, but this is about, almost, absolution for our faults and coming full circle after great trial and trauma. The author's turn of phrase is amazing, especially when it comes to expressing all kinds of love and devotion in a non-sappy way. I don't have children, and never went through the kind of situation that happened to Sara but I can still relate to the emotions behind this book. Anyone could with how well it is written. You will laugh, cry, and be sad when this book is over. Recommend highly.

Five stars.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great topic for a book club discussion, July 29, 2004

By	J. Fercho (Calgary, AB. Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The subjects of teenage pregancy and open adoption are sure to push alot of buttons during any group discussion, and the author certainly provides plenty of fodder for conversation. I felt for the character of Sara; young and intellegent with nothing but promise and success maped out in her future, she finds herself deep in the throws of adolescent love with a boy from the "wrong side of the tracks". An unplanned pregnancy results and Sara for all her intellegence childishly chooses to ignore things until too late. She proceeds with an open adoption which of course we know is headed for disaster. I thought the issues of maternal devotion and insecurity(by both the birth and adopted mothers), were accurately portrayed and painfully realistic. The birth father appears to have no interest in the child and although Sara is forced to move on with her life, she is never fully able to let go of the baby she left behind. The book provides a satisfying conclusion (no sugar coating here), on what is a complicated and emotionally laden issue. There are no winners here just a oddly comprised "family" struggling to make a life for themselves. A few of the characters were fairly weak (Sara's parents were paper thin, and Danny's mother was a little sterotypical), but overall a good effort by this author.