THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG, Author Leila Mottley's sophomore novel...worth the wait

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A worthy follow-up to Mottley's debut novel...link to my 4.5* praise for it is at the top...and one that evokes a strong sense of a place both radically different (cosmetically) and exactly the same as Oakland in Nightcrawling. "No matter where you go, there you are" said Peter Weller in the cult movie with the long title I don't want to type.

Kiara's siblings in trappedness in this book are Adela, Simone, and Emory. Not one scintilla of good luck, or often enough good sense, between 'em. This is what really makes the read come alive for me. These three young women are all pregnant, one again, and teenagers. Their little Peyton-Place-y gossip factory, Padua Beach, has written them off. They gravitate together to give mutual aid and comfort, often as the only source of help for each of them. "Family" is usually best found in this story. They're there for each other because there's no one else willing to do what's needed, more than the minimum anyway.

Not one girl had an abortion; not one impregnator has done one damn helpful thing. Welcome to the world rapist Kavanaugh and christian nutball Coney Barrett were elevated far beyond their capabilities to enable.

You know you're not gettin' away from here without hearing about how stories can and should give the reader a dose of empathy expansion and exercise.

I think the most important reason to read *this* book at *this* moment is that the stories of each narrator are told from her PoV. It's all too frequent for a book on this kind of intimate scale, dealing with this intimate, very personal topic, to be narrated from the outside. Instead Author Mottley chose to tell us the stories of these young women in their own eyes, how it looks to them not someone standing aside, not involved with the necessary action of pregnancy. Of course there is a certain, if not penalty then effect on the narrative pacing. Very like pregnancy itself, the first two-thirds of the young mothers' tale is just slow, it sort of meanders and makes its way through their experiences; and then that last third is non-stop. I'm reluctant to quote lines out of their context because there are spoilers, but believe me: Author Mottley delivers on her literary promise.

If you go into the read forearmed, permaybehaps you won't experience the impatient, finger-tapping sense of "get on with it!" that marked me down as a four-star reader. The last ~125 pages will be well worth your time, I assure you.

We're sliding into some dark days. These three young women are your cicerones to a way out: They are the people we need to focus on helping. Knowing how they feel should make that easier. Anf you'll really enjoy a well-told story.

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy...if they have the chance

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
MELISSA DECKMAN
Columbia University Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office.

A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US presidential election is a few weeks away. Many of my Boomer peers are, I fear, going to be very angry, and the young men they've knowingly toxified will take to the streets.

It will be futile.

The long-term trend, "the arc of the moral universe," is not on their side. This book shows that the overall age cohort, absent the targeted and radicalized men we insultingly call "incels" and other dismissive and emasculating nicknames, isn't getting the authoritarian message. They aren't doing what we did, sitting down at our desks and shutting our mouths, because the stupid greedy oldsters at the top stopped "sharing" the wealth. (That our labor created, but never mind that for now.)

You take away people's stake in the system, you throw away the stick you can beat them back into line with. The Jesus freaks and their multivarious co-religionists in the control cult have realized this and gone full theocracy in response. And the grim truth is staring at them from every young person's eyes: "NO." The word they hate the most. Good for the youth, I say. Stonewall in 1969 was my signal that I could say no. George Floyd's murder, #BLM #MeToo Roevember are theirs.

But the money is still going to do its bloody, vicious, destructive best to stay on top. The Russians, with their collaborators the City men in London, are swimming in money. These are deeply illiberal people with A LOT TO LOSE. Read some Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro, study up on Alexei Navalny and his fate, look into the reason the felonious (thirty-four convictions!) Cheeto-dusted grifter got installed in government housing in 2016. Hoping that'll happen at a different Pennsylvania address again soon...preferably White Deer, Pennsylvania, this time...like me? Pay sustained attention to this existentially threatening election.

That said, there's a lot of work to be done to mend fences with this embittered cohort of people. As Psychology Today reports in their article on the topic that refers to the author and her findings, "Gen Z Americans are interested in addressing specific issues rather than defending a party position. Whether or not they identify as liberal or conservative, they agree on the need for effective government solutions to major social challenges. The disagreements over more or less government intervention that underlie the polarized American political landscape of today are less visible amongst them."

If that is not a blaring klaxon for oldsters to Pay Bloody Attention I can't imagine what else could be. The existence of the GOP and the Democratic Party are not divinely ordained. This sclerotic duopoly is not the only possibility of goverment organization for the young who have witnessed the venality and callousness of both sides to the burgeoning crises around the world. I have to take a half-star off for the author's choice to leave this tendentious conclusion out of the book.

I do not want to understate the stakes of 45's hand-picked Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215. This last-ditch effort to reduce women's right to full citizenship, ie bodily autonomy, as a means of social control, is probably going to galvanize young women to vote in large numbers. Thank all those useless gods for that. Every other facet of this horrible travesty of justice is sick-making.

The diversity of the activism of this age cohort is ethnic more than gender-based. The efforts to undermine the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are meant to reduce the access to voting of the most radicalized women in this generational cohort.

The young could save us from the vast right-wing conspiracy referenced by Hillary Clinton in 1995, the one determined to reinstall the convicted felon in charge of the most powerful machinery of coercion on the planet, achieving their aim. I'm hopeful they can. The obstacles put on the way of their ability to do so, the deliberate and carefully calculated efforts to hive off the angriest, thus most likely to take action, young men from the predominant attitudes of their peers, could work...but only if we ignore their reality.

Don't sleepwalk into 1933 Germany's fate The threat to democracy, flawed and fucked-up as it is, is real.

ABORTION STORIES: DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open, & WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe

DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
ANGELA HUME
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of the radical feminist networks who worked outside the law to defend abortion.

Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can empty the contents of the uterus in case of pregnancy using equipment that can be easily bought and assembled at home. This “self-help” movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists and health workers determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs―to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves.

Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 90s. The movement’s drive to keep abortion accessible led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors. From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist healthcare clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation’s first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence.

Deep Care follows generations of activists and clinicians who orbited the Women's Choice clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done―despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews of activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume retells three decades of this critical, if under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: By limiting her scope to activists in the Bay Area of California, Author Hume enables herself to dive deeply into the whys, hows, and wherefores of the activists who believed then, and will inspire others now to believe, in the truest expression of "self-help." There is a huge weight of wrongheadedness and immorality bearing down on women's rights. There always has been, of course; patriarchy isn't a new idea, and making up a matriarchal past from evidence so fragmentary as to be useless for tendentious argument is not particularly helpful to resisting the current, powerful, well-funded assault.

Author Hume does not shy away from graphic evocation of the procedures she enumerates the activists providing. It's astonishing to me how very difficult pregnancy is...to start, to finish, to understand in its myriad complexities. It was not always pleasant to encounter this information.

The broader framework of resistance and activism on multiple social fronts in that fifty-years-gone time and place is not skimped. The long-gone groups, their interlocking aims, their interpenetration of membership, wildly proliferate and birth acronym after abbreviation thus are correspondingly difficult to keep track of. As is so often the case among resisters of any facet of the status quo, the vicious internecine fights are hard to read about. I have this wild, unruly desire to scream at the idiots fighting over nonsense to grow up and get a grip! Fight the right-wingers in charge, not each other! It's just handing the rotters victory in their efforts to control and exploit everone for fun and profit to fight among yourselves!

I took long breaks from this read to avoid having more strokes from fury at the dimwits who refuse to accept impure, compromise positions because they are RIGHT and that should be OBVIOUS so everyone should do as they say! Which is, oddly enough, exactly what the right-wingers say.

Funny, that.

The thrust of this book is, as I see it, what worked before can work again. Get your gloves out, the literal healthcare ones and the metaphorical battle ones. The world's going to go into reverse unless we all do a LOT OF RESISTING, at ballot boxes, at clinic-defense events, at community meetings.

It worked before, it can again, but not without personal, individual commitments to show up in the flesh. Slacktivism is helpful to direct the conversation but more is needed to oppose the wave of nightmare invasive evil laws.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe
CURTIS BOYD & GLENNA HALVORSON-BOYD
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the Dallas Fire Department had saved the clinic, we were shaken and heartsick that our son had just spent Christmas Day at a crime scene. I had performed my first abortion in the year Kyle was born, and though he had long supported our work, he now felt worried for us in ways he’d never expressed. As we stood near the ruins, breathing fresh air in gulps, he said, “Do you have to keep doing this work?”

We were both silent for long moments before I simply said, “No. We choose to.”

In this deeply personal account, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their lives in abortion care, from the childhood experiences that shaped their paths to the Supreme Court decision that forced the closure of their Dallas clinic. Their stories begin in the 1960s, as Curtis opens a clandestine abortion practice while breaking with the beliefs of his Baptist family and Glenna pursues psychology while coming to understand the world of restrictive gender roles. When the two of them meet shortly after abortion is legalized, they bond over a common commitment to women, forming a professional and personal partnership that will weather the coming decades. We Choose To is the story of that partnership, and the staff and patients that have shaped the history of modern abortion.

In these pages, Curtis and Glenna share their holistic, morally rooted approach to their work. Led by a desire to empower patients, they advance abortion and mental health care further than ever even as they find themselves at the center of a controversial new issue in American life. Sweeping, introspective, and deeply honest, We Choose To is a rare portrait of abortion providers and the world in which they work, where abortion is not a talking point in a culture war but a private, even spiritual, act.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're wondering what kind of person is drawn to resist social injustice, read this joint memoir by two powerfully rooted in faith people. They set themselves out to provide care for women who were not being served in their time of need by any system allegedly meant to do so.

I'm strongly anti-religion because people like the authors are far too seldom to be found in the ranks of churchgoers. These people are exemplars of walking the walk while self-awarely not talking the most frquently heard talk from the faith they once shared.

I emerged from this read far more ready to smile about the world's future. These deeply admirable people have raised kids and lived lives of service and, by example, inspired others. What more can one ask?

Thank you both for sharing your motivations and reasons for being genuinely good.