It took me a couple chapters to get the hang of reading Gail Giles’s Girls Like Us, but it was well worth getting used to the “speech patterns” of the young ladies this book is about.  The book is told through the alternating lenses of Quincy and Biddy, young adults learning to make their way in the world after graduating from a high school’s special education program.  Ms. Giles’s inside information as far as such programs and the people within them is quite apparent.  She clearly knows this population well. 

Biddy and Quincy were helped with the transition from school to the workforce, with job placements and living arrangements.  But really while those two things are critically important, there is so much else they have to do!  They have to manage their time, including duties like work, meals, and perhaps the most challenging – personal relationships.  While they had been in school together, they were not truly friends, so being thrust together into a new locale, and living together under the same roof was a definite challenge for each of them.

Giles’s technique of using Quincy and Biddy to tell their own story is accomplished with skill.  While reading the book, one not only gets used to the style, as if talking to these girls, but discovers the history each has gone through.  These young women describe how people with special abilities and disabilities such as theirs are sometimes cast aside by society and considered somehow less than others.  Their stories may surprise the reader.  The depth and complexity of their lives, feelings, and thoughts as they make their way through good and bad relationships and figure out how to get along with each other, becomes quite apparent. 

At first, the reader may conclude Biddy suffers from laziness or a lack of motivation, and that is the source of her weight problem.  But there is so much more to it!  Quincy tends to be the more protective of the two, and even has a tendency to violence as a solution as her temper flares and she becomes frustrated.  She is protective of Biddy.  As the book progresses however, Quincy’s story changes through physical and emotional challenges and threats.  As Quincy’s world is threatened, Biddy discovers more about her strength and abilities; the two women learn about more common threads they share.  The changes both women undergo are impressive.

There is a third strong woman in the book:  Miss Lizzy.  Miss Lizzy employs Biddy and provides housing for both of the girls.  Again relationships do not remain simple – there are misunderstandings and arguments, growth and learning.  Under all of this grows a strong and powerful relationship between all three women.  They create their relationships, learn from one another, grow and develop as a family – unconventional, but with a strong bond, respect and love for one another.

© 2015 Margaret Riley

Margaret Riley, PhD, MS, RN. Assistant Professor at Regis University, Loretto Heights School of Nursing.