Unlike the sinister and filthy abortionists that populate the genre in the previous decade, the retired American physician who has set up practice across the border is clean, professional and compassionate he states that he hasn’t been seeing too many patients since Roe v. After her Catholic obstetrician won’t even discuss the newly-legalized procedure with her, Kate opts to go to Mexico on a co-worker’s recommendation (her daughter’s friends are candy stripers at the local hospital and she’s mortified at the thought of running into someone she knows). While the dust-jacket states that “the very idea of abortion is repugnant to her”, that is not quite accurate. In fact, the fact that Kate’s is enceinte, is due to the fact that her son, Chris, broke his arm while on a getting-to-know-you outing with Dan and his sisters: Dan freaked out so badly that teenaged Diane had to drive him to the hospital ( sans Learner’s Permit) and Kate forgot to take her birth control pill in all of the hubbub. Dan is kind of a bumbling idiot man-child (Kate has to explain what stretch marks are the first time they go to bed together) and he goes to pieces with every interaction he has with her children. Her Perry White-like boss is all “I like your moxie, kid!” and gives her the job when she has trouble juggling her responsibilities to her family and career he takes her on as a freelancer, because “I like your talent, kid!” Besides, she’s the best at coming up with adjectives to describe the swimming pool at the Fairlawn Hotel (Splashtacular!)ĭan is the graphic designer at the ad agency he’s an unspecified number of years her junior, but her teenaged daughter, Diane, insists that he’s closer to her own age than Kate’s. Kate leaves her hometown of Miami Beach for Santa Fe, where she talks her way into a copywriting position at an ad agency, based on the fact that she has been married to an ad man. While he insists that his girlfriend, Barbara, means nothing to him, he’s married to her before the ink is dry on the divorce decree. Married the spring of her Freshman year of college, (after which she dropped out), Kate’s identity has been defined as a wife and mother for twelve years when she learns that her husband, Rob, has been carrying on a long-term affair, because “I’m a man!” and that gives him the right to. The narrative is structured over the nine months of Kate’s pregnancy, but weaves multiple flashbacks through the plot to reveal how her first marriage ended and how she came to move from Florida to New Mexico, started a career in advertising after having never held down a job in her life, and became involved with Dan. She admits up front that Dan doesn’t like children and her own kids don’t care all that much for him, either. A few years divorced, and living on her own for the first time in her life, she has been dating a much younger co-worker who seems to be a confirmed bachelor.
How will she tell her boyfriend? Or her parents?īut Kate is no high school student: she’s a 35 year old mother of three, including a teenage daughter. The Plot: The book opens like most do in the Pregnant Teen genre, with the heroine, Kate Michener, lying in bed one morning, knowing that her period is far, far too late and she is In Trouble.
While in this case Duncan eschews the mystery/suspense elements, the changing social mores of the 70s remain front and center.
This week’s selection is, at first glance, an oddball volume in Duncan’s bibliography: you can tell that from the cover art, which is not even remotely terrifying. However, her work from the late 1960s through the 70s also explicitly addresses how both the teenage heroines and their mothers are dealing with the social and political gains and compromises of the women’s movement and how it is affecting family life. Background: Lois Duncan is best known for her YA thrillers, which often involve a supernatural element, such as telepathy or psychic intuition, or witchcraft.