Thursday, October 16, 2008

single father

The First Part Last by Angela Johnson
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction, YA
Challenge: A-Z (author)
Review: It gives nothing about this book away to say up front that it's about a single father in high school raising his brand new daughter. Johnson alternates the action forward and backward from the birth of the child, showing Bobby's struggles caring for an infant, and also giving brief glimpses of how things went when Nia was pregnant.

By itself, it's a touching but realistic story of two students with promising futures that suddenly give way to parenthood because of one mistake. But for me, the story really came down to the question of why Bobby was raising the baby. This question is answered toward the end of the book, and to reveal that really would give the whole thing away.

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