Fourteen-year-old Jimmie (Janine) sits alone amid the Christmas litter and looks back over the past unhappy year in which her parents have been divorced…. Much of [Leap Before You Look] is concerned with Jimmie's concern for issues, her relationship with her friends, her first love affair, and her love for her small brother, and the story is therefore balanced and realistic. The characterizations and relationships are excellent, the development perceptive, so that when Jimmie, alone on Christmas morning, decides to telephone her father (whose marriage she has resented) it is an adjustment arrived at gradually and convincingly. (p. 18)

Zena Sutherland, in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (© 1972 by the University of Chicago; all rights reserved), September, 1972.