Me, Him, Them, and It by Caela Carter

Series: Standalone

Release Date: February 26th, 2013

Rating: 4.75/5 stars

Another book that I was wary of reading. Mainly because it’s an emotional topic: teenage pregnancy. In some books, the authors go the route where everything works out fine; typically, this occurs in first or second-year university. But there are rare books that target pregnancy in high school. In real life, rarely are these tales of happily ever afters. And Me, Him, Them and It is a story of a troubled and emotionally broken girl who happens to get pregnant. And although this story is about how our heroine, Evelyn deals with pregnancy at age 16, it’s really more of a story about how she grows and develops as a girl, thrust into adulthood too early. It’s a novel of Evelyn’s life and why she is the way she is.

The writing of Me, Him, Them and It blew me away. This was mainly because Evelyn was honestly tangible. Her voice was so real, it felt that I knew her. Her heartbreak, her hurt, her anger, her laughter… her life flew off the page. Her voice was so fluid and easy to read and accept because she felt so realistic and real. It was amazing to read, and for this reason, I literally ate up the pages.

What I found was really clever was that instead of the author dividing the book using chapters, she instead used, for example, “37 Stays to Decide”. By having this, the reader never took their minds off the fact that while dealing with everything else in her life, Evelyn was still pregnant, and that was the central part of the plot.

The characters in Me, Him, Them and It were also imaginative, much like Evelyn herself. Their personas were written so vividly and bluntly honest in Evelyn’s narrative that you could think up her father, The Stranger, her mother, The Ice Queen and her best friend, and the guy she’s in love with, Todd, who’s also the baby’s father. And her interactions with each of them were unique to her relationship with them. This is hard to capture in books, but Carter did it excellently.

And again, the fact that she and Todd are both teenagers–who do not have the maturity to be parents–is clearly shown with how the two deal with pregnancy. Evelyn putting off telling Todd about her pregnancy (by not talking about It, she can pretend it isn’t real) and Todd worrying about what his parents will say and, at the same time, worrying about all the repercussions. Teenagers are usually short-sighted; they prefer to see what’s happening to them at the moment and not really focusing on how it will impact them in the future. And the fact that all the backstories happening with other characters, like Evelyn’s best friend searching for her father, it connected to Evelyn’s decision to either have an abortion, choose adoption or to raise the baby herself.

Me, Him, Them and It was a tear-jerker. And this isn’t because it was sad; it happens every day in real life. But really because Carter told this story so honestly. It was a book about a girl who was emotionally immature in some ways, and in others had the wisdom of someone much older than her. It was about a girl growing up too soon, and becoming a parent to child when she herself was still a child. And it’s the voice of Evelyn through this that really got to me. So I admit that I cried. A lot. But a book that can make you cry is a book that should be read, and can I say, what a debut novel!

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