[For All the Wrong Reasons is another] teenage-pregnancy/early-marriage story with the obvious moral. Seventeen-year-old Tish cooly decides to lose her virginity but carefully selects the male. Peter McSweeny. When she becomes pregnant, Tish decides, independently, to have an abortion. Peter convinces her that marriage is the adult solution to the problem…. Split between wanting to be responsible and wanting to be free, he has a nervous breakdown and regresses to an earlier age. Peter is more believable than Tish, whose ability to face the problems of motherhood and her husband's mental illness develops too quickly. Similar to Ann Head's Mister and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones …, the subject is popular and is handled better here than in most other novels of the kind.

Carol Starr, "Books for Young Adults: 'For All the Wrong Reasons'," in School Library Journal, an appendix to Library Journal (reprinted from the September, 1973 issue...