Once again, I’m catching up with the last of the reviews for my Summer Reading Thing list. Website review tomorrow, and be sure to participate in the craft book club poll!

Suzanna Quincy has had a hard life—and, as the back cover of My Not-So-Fairy-Tale Life says, she hasn’t made it any easier on herself by turning to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of her abusive childhood. But when she finds out she’s pregnant, Suzanna knows something has to change.

She ends up moving across the country to live with her brother—a convert to the LDS church. Although Suzanna slowly acclimates to her new life, she’s still left with a lot of turmoil (and the pregnancy hormones don’t help). Kicking and screaming (sometimes literally), she slowly lets the people around her into her life. But believing in God? That might be asking a bit too much.

Suzanna also has to make a choice about her baby’s future. Can she raise a child when she thinks she’s a nobody? Or can Suzanna choose to give her child the stable family life she always wanted, even if it means adoption?

Julie wrote a guest post for us here on making readers love unlovable characters, so I was especially interested to look at the character of Suzanna in this book. Yes, she was unlovable—even she thought so. But she was still a sympathetic character—she was still someone I was rooting for, someone I wanted to see overcome the obstacles in her life (and stop putting them in her own way, too!). (Take a look at Julie’s great guest post for more on how she did this!)

The changes Suzanna made in her life were also pretty convincing, as was the emotional aftermath of Suzanna’s baby’s birth. Some of the changes, however, didn’t seem to get a full treatment, since the book spans over two years (and most of that is in the last three chapters).

What do you think? What does it take to make a 180 convincing in a character?