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GIRLS IN TROUBLE has numerous strengths and some weaknesses, but from the moment I began reading I thought, "This would make a great movie; boy, this would be a terrific movie." Given the fact that Leavitt has had books optioned for the screen before (all the way to the script being written), I don't think she wrote GIRLS IN TROUBLE with the goal of seeing it filmed; I think the movie-ready feel of the book is because her characters are so vivid and fully realized that they practically walk out of the pages.
Sixteen-year-old Sara Rothman refuses to acknowledge her pregnancy until she's well past the stage of having any option besides giving birth. Her slightly seedy boyfriend is on the lam, her starchy parents are horrified that their honor-student daughter has strayed from the college path, and the only people who radiate approval are Eva and George Rivers, the would-be birth parents. Before long, Sara has practically relocated to Eva and George's warm, comfortable, open lifestyle, in which she --- the birth mother --- has a starring role. Feted with delicious food, little comforts and plenty of verbal encouragement, Sara seems to be living in a fairy tale for unwed mothers.
Leavitt, of course, is too savvy a storyteller to allow the fairy tale to progress much further without a foray into the big, dark scary forest. Stung by rejection when the Rivers become preoccupied with new baby Anne, Sara exercises the kind of bad judgment people make when they're truly lonely (no spoiler here; besides, it isn't hard to guess what Sara might do). Leavitt is a microsurgeon of the choices we make that determine our lives' paths; the adult Sara, older Eva and adolescent Anne all square with the characters we met earlier in the novel.
In part, that is due to Leavitt's intimate knowledge of her subject: she wrote an essay for Salon called "Dating the Birth Mother," about her and writer/husband Jeff Tamarkin's forays into open adoption. While the couple ultimately chose to forego adopting a child, Leavitt found herself fascinated by the teenagers she spoke to and created the character of Sara: "And the more I talked to these girls, the more I began to feel that some of them yearned for something more than just a good home for their babies. They yearned for me. They wanted to be a part of my family because here was the one place where they were getting approval, where they could be sixteen and wrest back a bit of that sixteen-year-old life without even a hint of disapproval," she wrote for Powells.com.
From that yearning, Leavitt has created a novel that is as compulsively readable as a can of Pringles is snackable --- but unlike the Pringles, filled with substance. In the middle, perhaps, is a bit of airy filler; as in her previous book, COMING BACK TO ME, Leavitt runs into a spot of trouble trying to transcribe the passage of time (in that book it was while the protagonist lay in a hospital bed that the action wavered). Perhaps that's because, like her readers, she is eager to get back to the meat of the story, the back-and-forth, the tug-of-war, the push-me, pull-you of parenting in all its stages and guises. In that eagerness, too many loose ends get tied up too neatly, too quickly.
However, no matter what its flaws, this book is real and true. When so many books published now are technically adequate but soulless, that should count for a great deal. Maybe a movie deal?
--- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick
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