If I Was Your Girl, by Ni-Ni Simone
Simone, Ni-Ni (2008). If I Was Your Girl. NY: Dafina. 230 pages.
As promised, I’m working my way through the Ni-Ni Simone oeurve and, with If I Was Your Girl, have just engaged with one half of a two-book set, the first (I read them out of order) of which is called Shortie Like Mine, both of which tell the story of a pair of twins from each girl’s perspective. If I Was begins with seventeen-year-old Toi’s discovery of her boyfriend and baby daddy’s infidelity. After Toi, her sister, and her girlfriends discover Toi’s boy Quamir getting freaky with some ho, Toi slowly begins to realize that her future–and her baby’s future–with Quamir is anything but secure. And it’s not like the relationship was great to begin with: Quamir never helped with Toi’s bills and kept bothering her at work, playing jealous when she tried to wait on customers at the IHOP.
When Toi meets Harlem, a good-looking university student, their connection is immediate; however, when Harlem reveals that he thinks teenage mothers are just “statistics” and that, as such, have pretty much screwed themselves out of their futures, Toi is offended and uncertain as to when and if she should reveal her own “statistical” status.
There’s a little bit of genre-fied drama in this story and some obligatory “scenes from the hood” (most notably the first scene in the book, in which Toi and her girls give Quamir’s new lay a beatdown); however, Simone’s novel departs from its urban literary roots in a number of ways. Unlike A Girl Like Me, this story doesn’t follow the Cinderella-in-the-Hood narrative that populates so much young people’s fiction of this type. Instead, after all the drama with Quamir and Harlem, Toi decides she needs to focus on getting her own life together and spends the last quarter of the book doing just this. While purists might argue that not enough time is spent demonstrating the struggles with time, privacy, etc. that come with teenage motherhood, the point of the novel is not to vilify teen moms or glorify exceptions, and this lack of didacticism is a feature that I really appreciate in a YA novel. Instead, the novel treats Toi’s eventual maturation with respect and realism. When Toi decides that she might like to go to college, there’s not magical Single Mom Scholarship that appears and she has to figure out how (financially and literally) she might be able to attend school with her sister. The novel emphasizes the importance of family and its attendant support, but does so in a way that manages to avoid sentimentality. There are some sort of stock characters who add comic relief and who represent the Old School here that are pretty funny, too, and this admittedly silly humor distinguishes the book as well.