Love and Haight
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It's 1971, and seventeen-year-old Chloe and her best friend MJ head to San Francisco to ring in the New Year. But Chloe has an ulterior motive—and a secret. She's pregnant and has devised a plan not to be. In San Francisco's flower-power heyday, it was (just about) legal to end her pregnancy.
But as soon as the girls cross the Golden Gate, the scheme starts to unravel amid the bellbottoms, love-beads, and bongs. Chloe's secrets escalate until she betrays everyone she cares about. MJ, who has grave doubts about Chloe's plan. Her groovy aunt Kiki, who's offered the girls a place to crash. Her self-absorbed mother meditating back in Phoenix. And maybe, especially, the boy she wishes she'd waited for.
In Susan Carlton's Love and Haight, Chloe discovers that easy love is anything but easy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As New Year 1972 approaches, pregnant Chloe and her longtime best friend MJ drive from Phoenix to San Francisco, where abortion is legal. But even in the counterculture haven, 17-year-old Chloe must first complete several steps, including finding a psychiatrist who will declare that her pregnancy is a risk to her sanity. There are other complications as well, including a run-in with antiabortion protestors; growing tension with Catholic MJ, who believes that Chloe's "little being.... has a soul"; and Chloe's unexpected rekindled flirtation with MJ's brother. Carlton (Lobsterland) blends educational elements about abortion services and attitudes in the early 1970s into her story, including descriptions of Chloe's meetings with various medical professionals, while still making this the personal story of a girl who worries both that she will regret her choice or that "For the rest of my life, I will be the girl who had an abortion." Readers will appreciate the different loved ones in Chloe's life who struggle to support her in a world that, as her hippie aunt Kiki says, "shimmers in shades of gray." Ages 14 up.
