Rating: 
Summary: Great
Review: Through sets of chapters reverting from "then" to "now", Angela Johnson tells the story of Bobby and his baby Feather. Bobby is 16 and when his girlfriend Nia tells him she's pregnant, his world changes dramatically. Because of the unique way this single story is split into two time periods that meet at the end, you already know the ending (or so you think) but you don't know how events unfolded to get you there. From sketches of Bobby's life before Feather is born to days when he is bone weary from caring for her in the absence of her mother, this book is excellent. The perspective of a single father raising a child is fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: It should be treasured.
Review: We've all read plenty of stories about teen moms. In most of these tales, the moms are raising their babies by themselves because the dads are irresponsible, uninvolved, or just plain absent. Aren't there any good teenage dads out there?
In THE FIRST PART LAST, the story of a teen father's growing love for his baby daughter, Angela Johnson turns the tables as she revisits a character from her award-winning novel, HEAVEN. Bobby is an ambitious young man. An aspiring artist with talented parents, he is poised to graduate early from high school. But when his girlfriend Nia surprises him on his sixteenth birthday with the news of her pregnancy, Bobby's whole world turns upside down.
This brief novel alternates chapters between "then" and "now." The "then" is the story of Nia's pregnancy, as Bobby and Nia struggle to decide whether to raise their child or cave to parental pressure and give her up for adoption. The "now" is Bobby's own struggle to do the right thing for his infant daughter Feather, as a tragedy surrounding her birth has left him to care for her alone. Bobby is lucky to have a good support system, including his mother and father, his buddies, and his caring older brother. All along, Bobby's voice, which narrates the story, wavers between great love for his daughter and panic at his situation, but the emotional heart of the story never falters.
In the end, the portrayal of Bobby's relationship with his daughter is a positive one, although some critical readers might get the impression that Johnson is providing the wrong kind of role model. Not to worry. Although she does depict Bobby as a genuinely caring father, she also provides a grim picture of the not-so-rosy realities of teen parenthood, as Bobby copes with daycare dilemmas and his own insecurities: "This little thing with the perfect face and hands doing nothing but counting on me. And me wanting nothing else but to run crying into my own mom's room and have her do the whole thing."
If this novel has one fault, it is that Bobby seems so wrapped up in his daughter that he doesn't take time to dwell on his grief over Nia's fate. Bobby is a caring person who seemed to truly love his girlfriend (even heading halfway across Manhattan to satisfy her pregnancy cravings), so his lack of reflection on the loss of this relationship doesn't ring true.
Overall, though, THE FIRST PART LAST offers an all too-rare portrayal of a caring, nurturing young man, and it should be treasured as a result.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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