3. A Dance for Three

Plummer, Louise. A Dance for Three. New York: Delacorte Press, 2000.

Annotation: When 15 year old Hannah Ziebarth finds herself pregnant with a boyfriend who rejects her, Hannah's mental state is challenged and her world is turned upside down.

Reason for Rejection: The premise of Louise Plummer's book is the pregnancy of Hannah Ziebarth. Hannah is 15 years old and lives with her mother. Her father died from a freak burp two years ago. Hannah's boyfriend, Milo, is Hannah's first love. Milo is from a wealthy family and Hannah believes that when Milo finds out she's pregnant with his child that he will ask her to marry him and move into his family's estate. What happens instead is that Milo beats her, which sends Hannah into a free fall and eventually lands her in the mental ward of the hospital.

While I believe that the topics of the novel are all timely (pregnancy, death, mental illness, relationships with parents, boyfriends, and friends), I think that Ms. Plummer tackled too much and fell short. Even from the cover, the book felt like it was clouded over and that the character experiences were not as realistic as they could be. When Hannah tells Milo that she's pregnant, Milo immediately shoves and hits her. Although this reaction may be realistic, the language Milo uses is awkward and therefore the reader finds it unbelievable.

Hannah's mother is portrayed as a widow who is unable to care for anything except her plants. Hannah does everything for her, including fixing meals, shopping, and lying to acquaintances that everything is ok. Although an interesting portrayal of a widow who has a mental illness, I don't think she is fully developed and the reader doesn't ever have a firm grasp on who she is.

The book also falls short in other ways. Hannah's mother is annoyingly not disturbed by her daughter's pregnancy. While the reader knows that Hannah's mother has some mental issues, she is not shown as somebody who is incapable of communicating. So the fact that she is so nonchalant about the pregnancy is not believable and unrealistic.

When Hannah tells Milo about the pregnancy and he proceeds to hit her and deny he's the father, I think it's questionable that Hannah does nothing about it. Maybe there are some girls who would just accept this, but I don't think that shows her in a very good light. Ms. Plummer's job is certainly not to preach what a teenage girl should do when she gets pregnant, but when she shows Hannah as weak and not able to confront Milo, it is depressing to the reader. Hannah not only does not report the assault, but she also doesn't pursue legal action against him. There was no dialogue regarding struggling about keeping the baby, abortion, or adoption or any other deep internal conflict that she must have been going through.

Books such as Prozac Nation and The Bell Jar deal with mental illness and realistic experiences in a way that is much more believable to the reader as they are full of raw emotions. The author of A Dance for Three spends too much time tippy-toeing over important subject and packs in too many problems for the novel to be believable.

Genre: realistic fiction