Love and Haight
New Year’s Eve in San Francisco with your best friend and your cool aunt—what could be better? For 17-year-old Chloe, it could be better if she weren’t pregnant and planning a secret abortion. The year is 1971 and abortions are legal only in California and New York, so Chloe must navigate the onerous exams, parental permissions (without said parents), and psychological tests required to convince the hospital board to allow her procedure to move forward. In a blatant yet timely history lesson for young women, Carlton transports readers to a decade when abortion was becoming a more open, if still only occasionally legal, possibility, as opposed to the backroom horrors or unhappy weddings that were too often the norm. Carlton gets the ’70s drug-and-free-love culture exactly right, but she respects women enough to constantly return to the difficulty inherent in making this painful, life-changing decision, regardless of time or circumstance. A cautionary tale on many levels, this is an important book that teens will want to discuss. Grades 8-12. --Frances Bradburn