This is a beautiful book. It’s about two teenage women who come together due to special circumstances.
Jill is a seventeen-year-old girl. She likes dressing in black and using eye liner like her boyfriend Dylan, and I think they are like some kind of Goths. Jill is still at school, but the main event that has shattered her life is her father dying in a car crash. Jill adored her father and now she has changed a lot since that happened. Her way of coping with her loss is by pushing everybody away. She has an on and off relationship with her boyfriend, and she also had a fall-out with her other friends. There are feelings of guilt in Jill because of the time she feels she wasted with her father, and naturally she feels very angry and sad all the time. She is unable to talk about her dad, not even with her mother. She’s grieving and I think she doesn’t know how to deal with this grief she feels. Jill works in a book store, and there she meets Ravi, who also works for the company and used to be in the same class as her a couple of years ago. Jill doesn’t even remember him, but little by little they start forging a good friendship.
Things come to a head with Jill when her mother tells her about her intention to adopt a baby. It’s an open adoption, which means both the adopted family and the birth mother could have some kind of contact with the child. Mandy is the nineteen-year-old girl who is going to give birth to the baby Jill’s mother, Robin, will adopt. Mandy comes to Denver and stays with Robin and Jill. She will give birth in a month to a girl. Mandy’s life hasn’t been a bed of roses. Her mother made her feel a burden most of the time and was only interested in the string of boyfriends she’s had over the years in search of the ideal man. Mandy never met her father since he was a married man who just wanted to get rid of Mandy’s mother when she told him she was pregnant. Now the girl is pregnant. She mentions Christopher, an Indian boy she met and had a sexual encounter with once, and she wants to believe he’s the father of her baby. Yet, we also know that Kent, her mother’s latest boyfriend, had her way with her when her mother was asleep. Mandy doesn’t mention it was rape, but it’s obvious it was since she wasn’t a willing participant. I doubt Christopher is the father of the baby, and it’s more likely to be Kent. I’m really sorry for Mandy. She is a nice girl who wants to give her baby what she never had, a real family and love. I think Mandy is really confused about life, and she simply wants to belong. I think that so far the only person who has understood her is Dylan, and she feels a good rapport with him, but I think it’s only friendship, or at least, that’s what she thinks.
Mandy is also quite weird. She lies to Robin about some of the things related to her pregnancy. She told her that she had finished school, but in fact, she had to drop out since she got pregnant and before that, she had to miss one year when her mother dragged her on a journey following one of her boyfriends. She also lied about how along she was and the sex of the baby, and the reason why she lied was that she was afraid of being refused. She really wants Robin to take her baby because this is the home and family she would have liked to have had herself. There is also something very odd about her and some letters she starts writing. She met a guy on the train to Denver and surreptitiously got his address from the magazine he was reading. And now she writes to him, and the guy must surely freak out when he gets those leater.
Naturally Jill isn’t happy with Mandy and her mother’s intentions. I think she’s jealous of Mandy and scared. Even though Jill plans to go away and travel after finishing school, I think she’s afraid of losing her mother. And she’s jealous of the relationship that her mother and Mandy have now. I think Robin is simply nice to Mandy as anybody could be, but Jill sees something more than that. Deep down, there are a lot of mixed feelings inside Jill, which she feels unable to express coherently. And now she has the idea of asking Ravi to investigate Mandy when she grows suspicious after catching a few inaccuracies in the things Mandy has told her mother. I think what Ravi finds out about Mandy won’t hurt her; in reality I think Jill will find how lucky she is to have at least a parent left who loves her, and I hope she realizes the kind of life Mandy has had so far.
And as for the relationship between Ravi and Jilly, I think he is helping him cope with her feelings, and she admits that she feels better around him than she has felt since her dad died. I guess she just needs a friend, and I hope this doesn’t mean she will break up with Dylan. I really like them together, but well, we’ll see what happens.
My Reading Journal 