Trouble: A memoir

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You find with this book you don't really connect with characters but you hear the, you listen to them, you hear their story which makes this a beautifully written and emotional novel to experience. If you know of anything similar in genre of this book. Please let me know. I want to hear people's stories like these to witness their happy endings. A book that makes me cry shows how truly amazing this author is. I need more and I can't wait to read Remix. Something entirely different. There was a lot of girl hate in here. Under the circumstances it makes sense. I mean, what pregnant teen doesn't get any grief from her peers? Having none would be unrealistic. This particular trope is one I'm tired of but it was not completely out of place.

There were a bunch of weird ideas about sex in this book. In places, it felt voyeuristic. The details were too much, imo, when it came to kids. Not the crass banter or the casual sex. Just the way the author handled it. It was very matter of fact about the fact that these people were all having sex, which I appreciated. But then there was slut-shaming aplenty and the underlying message that it was ok to say mean things about the people you don’t like. The chapter about Hannah’s pregnancy horniness was weird to read, considering we saw very little of her other pregnancy symptoms. And it was always the physical ones rather than the mental or emotional ones. Did we need to know how she felt? And for a book that took such a warts and all approach, there was no mention of masturbation which really was the ideal solution. If the end was a bit too nicely resolved...well, I can forgive a lot when a book is this well done. Most importantly, for a story with a pregnant 15-yr-old, no adult ever shames her for having had sex, or getting pregnant, even if they judge her for choosing to have the baby. There's a culture of slut shaming from some of the douchebag teenage characters, but it is not universal, and Aaron (the male lead) calls them on it, if not out loud, then in his head/narration. I think I built this book up in my mind too much. I saw that it was about underage pregnancy and that it was all acclaimed and everything and I thought that it would be raising some really interesting moral questions and shining a light on teen and underage pregnancies, which is a perennially hot topic. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out for me.

Her best friend is slipping away from her, when she finds out, she's just pissed off becaause Hannah didn't tell her sooner and goes to Marcy, former teen model and school's queen B, who makes sure everybody know it via Facebook. I was most definitely not a fan of Jay, who is Hannah’s stepbrother and who turns out to be the father of her baby. The age of consent in the UK is sixteen and Hannah was fifteen when they had sex, so technically that makes him a rapist, but this fact was completely skated over. So was the fact that he’s Hannah’s stepbrother. That just sat all wrong for me and I found the sex scene with him and Hannah a bit grim. I was making faces, and not good ones, and the fact that Hannah was completely in love with him made me like her even less. Hannah has made some mistakes but she's he first character i've ever read in a Ya novel who talks about periods, being horny and the fact that she really likes sex. I didn’t really connect with or like Hannah very much either. The blurb printed on the cover says, ‘Hannah is smart and funny.’ The blurb and the text state that Hannah is smart. But she really is not. She is does badly at school. She only handles herself socially by putting down other people and portraying herself as really sexual. She’s not even emotionally intelleigent. She is funny and lively but she’s hugely immature.

And there ISN'T A ROMANCE, because Hannah has bigger things going on, you know. There are characters in relationships, there are 'in love with you' moments, there is deep love between characters, but there is never any moments where a romantic choice becomes greater or more meaningful than a platonic love. This is really about families of birth, families of choice, and the adaptation of characters to new situations. There are step families, and half siblings, and absent parents, and nuclear families. And these are all as valid as who chooses you, if you choose them.It was the stories they told, and the way they told them, that first got me interested in writing about those times. My father and his brothers were semi-literate, but they had such faith in language. Tellings of their times in Ireland were entirely questionable, and inevitably self-mythologising, yet there was something true in the way they owned their stories, relayed them in their own language – a polyglot of jokes, songs, random diversions, verbal sleight of hand, straight-up misinformation and pure folk poetry – that made me think of the art of storytelling as performative. It can’t be. Babies aren’t that big except in hospital shows, where they don’t have minutes-old babies on standby for the end of a birth scene. Hannah decides to confess who the real father is to her family, she comfrots Jay but doesn't want to. That's why she waits to get her family together and confesses. It’s super meaningful, and has so many brilliant messages for you to take away. There’s some pretty heavy themes in the second half of the book, but they were dealt with so well, and the book was still kept light and enjoyable. These dark feelings a character had were really important, and weren’t glorified in any way. It was real, dark, yet uplifting because of how well they were dealt with.

This is a really sex positive story, for one about teenage pregnancy. There's a misinterpretation of a scene of being forced, which gets resolved into something's that is both sex positive, about enthusiastic consent, and champions boys who call peers on bad behaviour. Yes, there's examples of perfectly teenage behaviour, with lying about conquests and such, but that doesn't diminish the sex positivity. One scene that totally didn't ring true and really bugged me was the courtroom "interrogation" of the witnesses: Why would Chay's lawyer laying out all the information that can convince anyone that Chay had every right to take revenge on Franklin, after being harassed for such a long time? All those questions serve as an exposition for the readers but it was done in a way that is not convincing at all. Pratt has created amazingly layered and captivating characters in the form of Hannah and Aaron and we get their stories in alternating chapters. Both of them are struggling with what is going on in their lives… Hannah in a very apparent way, and Aaron in a way that is a bit less apparent but none-the-less hard for him.For me this book is all about friendship and the main characters learning what it is to be a good friend. As the book goes on you get to see shifts in the social groups both Hannah and Aaron associate with and it is brilliant to see them at that last stage of high school going into adulthood as they suss out which of their friends are true friends and deserve the loyalty the other can offer. I’m not one of those pearl-clutching adult readers of YA. I love to see real life situations portrayed in books for teens and I don’t care about thinking of the children or whatever. I expect young people to act like young people and that includes make less than perfect choices and mistakes and everything else. Nor do I think books have to teach lessons or guide kids in any particular direction. I heard the author interviewed on NPR (WBUR?) for a more recently released YD book, “Okay for Now.” He sounded interesting and the book sounded good and I ended up buying both for my thirteen year old daughter. (She’s reading “The Hobbit” right now for school. I ask if it’s okay to read one of these books for school but she can’t. Today they take web based tests that go into some State database so kids can’t negotiate the approved list anymore with their teachers. Everything is decided by the all-knowing “Cloud.”) Man, I’ve done a lot more than that with her. It’s Hannah Sheppard – it’s what she’s for.”I really do not like Fletch.

And so readers are provided this information, along with the fact that Chay claims to have fallen asleep behind the wheel, and that he bandaged Franklin's arm with his shirt before racing off to get medical assistance. (Remember, this is the 1980s. There are no cell phones for calling 911.) Now, I know that Hannah’s decisions and reactions are realistic, and that people do stuff like this in real life, but she’s definitely not smart. Like all of Schmidt's books, Trouble is well-written, with lovely descriptions and excellent character voice. I'm not sure if it's just because I was purposefully looking for the descriptive passages, but Trouble's seem to be the best I've read in his books. Everything is so active and vibrant. I was definitely taking notes. The side character friends were really enjoyable but not as developed as I'd have liked. I would have loved to see a scene where Hannah and Anj discussed their former friendship and falling out after she had that epiphany about how toxic her relationship with Katie had been compared to AnjIt’s feminist. If you’ve read this, you might be thinking: “What on Earth is she talking about?!”, but hear me out. It doesn't explicitly deal with gender politics. But I found that the way this dealt with issues like slut-shaming, and misogyny in sex, really opened my eyes (and will do to so many other people). Let me explain further: