That's My Baby

by Norma Klein

Book Overview

An intelligent and perceptive story about a teenaged boy's affair with a married woman. Norma Klein writes vividly of "distinctly human adolescents who confront their problems with brain and wit." NEWSEEK

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0449703568
• ISBN13: 9780449703564
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Fawcett Books
• Length: 10 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.3" x 6.8"
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

Terrific work by a terrific novelist (and not just YA genre)

I've always enjoyed reading reading well-crafted, non-formulaic YA novels (I'm also recommending them to my grandkids these days), and Klein is always a dependable author. She was something of a groundbreaker in the 1970s, but by the late `80s, when this one came out, teenage culture had changed radically. (Now, with the country sliding back into intellectually repressed puritanism, maybe she'll become a retro-groundbreaker.) Anyway, Paul Gold is a senior in an arts TAG high school in New York. He's a talented writer who dreams of someday seeing his plays produced on Broadway, but he's also in most ways your basic eighteen-year-old. A one-nighter with Sonya, his best female friend, which they both sort of fell into unplanned, and her recriminatory attitude afterward, lead him to write a play about the incident for production at school. (It's all grist, folks.) But then Sonya gets together with Wolf, Paul's best male friend, and the balancing act becomes painful. But that's only part of it! When Paul takes a job walking the small, ancient, ugly dog belonging to married, twenty-two-year-old Zoe, a warm, conflicted, sweet young woman you can't help but have warm feelings toward. They begin an affair that they know can't last, and it doesn't. But what could have been merely a late-adolescent fantasy in other hands, becomes a charming, bittersweet love story under Klein's guidance. She knows how complicated life really is. Nice ending, too.

Holds Up

"That's My Baby" was my favorite book in middle school. Tenyears later, I'm amazed to find that I still love it, thoughfor completely different reasons. As a writer of fiction, Ireally admire Norma Klein's style--the characterization is finely drawn, the plot well-structured. She was an excellentnovelist and should not be forgotten.

A Teenage Trama

I think the book "That's my baby" is a excellent book for a average teenager. It explains in good detail about teenagers facing problems. This book is about a 18 year old boy named Paul having a affair with a 23 year old women named Zoe. It starts out as Paul seeing A ad made by Zoe that she put up in the apartment complex, for someone to walk her dog Baby. It turns into a hot love affair between Paul and the married Zoe. They sneak around behind everyone and make love constantly, until on day Zoe tells Paul she's pregnant, and isn't for sure who's it is. The affair ends and they go their seperate ways. Zoe and her husband end up moving out of the apartment complex to a house in Conneticut, and after high school Paul starts his play writing carrer. One day Zoe writes Paul a letter about one of his plays she saw, and ends up Paul goes down to visit her, and I'll leave it up to you to figure out what happens in the end.

This book is a very good book for teenagers to read.

In this book there are a lot of different twisted. Paul Gold is the main charater in the book. He is seventeen and a Senoir in High School. He has a lot going for him right now. But just doesn't have it going on with the ladies. One day he takes a job walking a dog. He finds himself attracted to Zoe Bernstien the dogs owner. The ending of this book is very intersting and this book had a lot of surprizes. I think tis book it great for someone who likes to read about mixed up romances. I would recommend That's My Baby to the younger readers.