Bad Tickets (review)

It's 1967, and with rebellion in the air Mary Margaret Hallinan is determined not to turn into her mother, a chain-smoking malcontent perpetually pregnant and resentful about it. Mary Margaret pitches over her old best friend, stick-in-the-mud Elizabeth, for new friend Jane, a wild child who is more than willing to egg Mary Margaret on in her quest to break loose from her good-girl image. Jane drags Mary Margaret off to parties in the communal residence of a group of college-aged boys, where Jane mistakes chemically influenced discussions of Siddhartha for depth of character and Mary Margaret discovers that she really likes liquor and pot. But Mary Margaret has been brought up a little too well after all and has a boyfriend who genuinely cares about her, and in the end it's parentally neglected Jane who falls for a guy who expects his woman to serve his needs and wishes. Jane gets pregnant, he needs a draft exemption, and Mary Margaret can only watch in distress as her friend enters into the kind of shotgun marriage that presages the elder Hallinans' unhappiness. Readers looking for a '60s novel have come to the right place; there's plenty of weed, hash brownies, teen sex (of both the liberated and the repressed varieties), and rock 'n' roll. Unfortunately, there's also an uneasy sense that these girls have been too carefully choreographed into their roles in order to deliver a timely message that, in the final analysis, strict parents are good parents, teen sex leads to trouble, and your dullest friends may be your truest friends. That may be a point well taken, but for YAs who came for the party, Mary Margaret and Jane are at their best when they're at their worst.