Give and Take

HOME SCHOOL BOOK REVIEW






Book: Give and Take



Author: Norma Klein



Publisher: Fawcett, republished 1986



ISBN-13: 978-0670806515 Hardcover



ISBN-10:  067080651X  Hardcover



ISBN-13:  978-0449701539 Paperback



ISBN-10:  0449701530 Paperback



Language level:  5



(1=nothing objectionable; 2=common euphemisms and/or childish slang terms; 3=some cursing and/or profanity; 4=a lot of cursing and/or profanity; 5=obscenity and/or vulgarity)



Recommended reading level: said to be for ages 12-15; I say for no one



Rating: * (1 star)



(5 stars=EXCELLENT; 4 stars=GOOD; 3 stars=FAIR; 2 stars=POOR; 1 star=VERY POOR; no stars=NOT RECOMMENDED)



Category: Teenage pornography



Reviewed by Wayne S. Walker



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     Klein, Norma. Give and Take (Published in 1985 by Viking Penguin Inc.; republished in 1986 by Fawcett Juniper Books, an imprint of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York City, NY). Eighteen-year-old Spencer, who just graduated from high school, was raised by and lives with his grandparents in Riverview, Michigan, because his parents were killed in an auto crash when he was two.  He has four older sisters, Willa, Carnie, June, and Lizzie, all adults and living on their own.  His best friends at school since fifth grade are Rob and Linc.  Spence is working during the summer for Mercer, one of his brothers-in-law who runs a construction business, and also e arns some money at the Michigan Repository for Germinal Choice, where he donates to their sperm bank. Spence and Rob are going off to college at the end of the summer, Spence to the University of Michigan and Rob to Wayne State, but Linc is staying home because he got his girlfriend Taffy, who had dated Spence in junior high, pregnant, so they got married and now have a baby.  As the center of a family of adoring sisters, Spence thinks he knows about women, but having broken up with his latest girlfriend Emmy Lou, he is still a virgin and doesn’t have a lot of experience with women.  Then he meets the mentally and sexually liberated, twenty-year-old Audrey at a travel agency, and he’s surprised by her ideas about relationships.



     I picked up this book on the free table at our local library, thinking that it might be a typical teenage romance story but told from the guy’s point of view which would make it interestingly different.  However is NOT about teenage romance.  It is all about teenage sex.  One might argue that it is not actually pornographic because there are no lurid, salacious, detailed, explicit sex scenes.  Let me quote you Spence’s account of his losing his virginity to Audrey, which happened on their third date, and let you decide how pornographic it is.  “She let me take her blouse off and caress her breasts, not even stopping me when I tried to kiss them or take her nipples in my mouth….Anyway, when she finally reached down and touched me and I was hard, I let her guide me inside her.  After that I couldn’t go back….I just moved inside her slowly….It was such a fantastic feeling that when I came, I just about passed out.”  When I was growing up, and a book had that kind of description in it, it would have been called a “dirty book.”  Should young people who are being raised to be godly read this kind of stuff?  Should any young people be reading this kind of stuff?



     Right after Spence’s first time, he got in a big argument over it with Audrey and basically he called his new girlfriend a slut.  On the rebound, he “made love” to Taffy, his old girlfriend now married to his friend Linc, but he felt awful about it after it was over and told her to stay away.  Then he got back with Audrey, saying, “I’ve been seeing Audrey a lot.  And we make love every chance we get, which is pretty often.”  He even later tells Taffy about Audrey and said, “I didn’t say I loved her….I just said that we do it and I’m not ashamed of it.”  There are other instances of sexual activity, such as when Linc and Spence go with Rob to locate housing for college, and Linc, who is married to Taffy and has a baby, hooks up with a girl and tells his friends, “We did it three times, and it was terrific.  Each time was better than the last.”  Smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, even to the point of getting drunk, are frequently mentioned, and a reference to smoking pot occurs. 



      Also, the language is bad with liberal doses of profanity (the terms God, Jesus, and Christ as exclamations), obscenity (the “d” and “h” words and even god**amn), and vulgarity (the “f” and “s” words), plus a lot of other sexual talk including times when Spence talks about his and Audrey’s being naked together.  The New York Times said of the author, “Norma Klein has a nice sense of what teenagers today might be feeling about themselves, each other, their bodies and minds, their friends and parents.”  Maybe she has a nice sense of what totally worldly teenagers are feeling, but she evidently has no concept about what teenagers who have been brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord are thinking.  I thought about quitting the book after a while but decided to finish it to see if there were some beneficial point or take-away lesson in the end.  There was none—it was all just mindless sex.  I will admit that the story is well-written and interestingly told, but as Cecil B. DeMille once noted, if something is not worth doing to begin with, it isn’t worth doing well.  I cannot recommend Give and Take.   As Michael Medved says of the bad films he has had to watch and review, I read the bad books so you don’t have to!