Ali is into sex, masturbation, and reading Playgirl, and she is concerned with all of life that centers on her own narrow world. Conversation (and [Breaking Up] is mainly conversation) is about bodily development, lifestyles, going braless, and making out. The book suffers from lack of story, from stereotyped characters, and from uninteresting (or no) plot—what we call meaningless writing. It is too bad that the writer of Mom, the Wolf Man and Me would foist this on us.

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Very young adolescents may read this because of their interest in sex and development, but Breaking Up will never make C. S. Lewis' qualification that a good book for young people must also have meaning for adults; my seventeen year old and I both found it insipid.

Norma Bagnall, in a review of "Breaking Up," in The ALAN Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1981, p. 13.