united states

It Happened to Nancy, is a true story based on the diary of a young girl's life. While obsessing over an older man, fourteen-year-old Nancy takes a turn for the worse. She mistakes true love for lust and the need of comfort. When her eighteen-year-old boyfriend Collin rapes her, she blames it on herself, thinking she led him to believing she wanted more. Collin infects Nancy with HIV, and she feels as though she has no one to talk to, so she confides her innermost feelings in her diary, which was then revised and edited by Dr. Beatrice Sparks.
I don't feel as though Nancy's diary was made for a story, as much as it was made to give young adults, and even adults, an insight to life with AIDS. Nancy proves that it's not easy, but that it is also not impossible. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys true stories, and is willing to really get to know Nancy. I felt as though this diary was best read when you try to put yourself in Nancy's position. This way you can get somewhat of an understanding of how she is feeling, and what she has to go through to survive.

I wish this were a fiction book, I really do. This diary of a 14 year old girl who was not only raped but left with the HIV virus is gut-wrenching. This poor girl had her life taken away from her before it really ever started. The fact that it's a true story makes it all the harder to read. I felt so bad for Nancy and was close to tears more than a few times during the course of the book. She goes from depression to happiness, trying to fight off the Virus, and sometimes even mentally convincing herself she can do it, other times she just wants to die. It's a look into the mind of a young teenage girl that has to go through something noone at any age deserves to go through. Her budding romance with a different boy her age was probably the hardest to read, as both she and I knew her talk of growing old with him and having his children, whould never happen, since some older guy decided to rape her. I feel for Nancy, and anyone else going through the same situation, this book was a real eye-opener.

This book isn't just for teenage girls either, I'm a 24 year old guy and still found this book to be an excellent experience. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you'll be a better person because of it.

I read this book twice in a row at fourteen and cried at the end both times, after having earlier scoffed at the book because of how stupid and naïve Nancy acted. It's really upsetting to find it may be largely or entirely a fraud, that this sweet courageous young person may have been made up or had her life made into something that was largely the creation of Dr. Sparks. A lot of girls are like Nancy and don't see anything fishy about an older man wanting to date them or letting an older boyfriend spend the night when their parents are away. During the stampede (or whatever the chaos was) at the Garth Brooks concert she attends with her friends, Nancy has an asthma attack and finds herself being taken care of by a strange older boy named Collin. She never tells him to get away from her because she doesn't know him, or tell him he's too old for her at her age. (Four years of age difference in a relationship isn't that big of a deal, but if you're 14 and 18, it's not the same as, say, an 18 year old and a 22 year old.) She never even tells her mother about this relationship, or any of her friends. It turns out his real name is Gary and that he's 32 years old.

In hindsight some of it does seem too fishy to be true. How was Nancy's doctor able to give her an HIV test without her knowledge or permission, why does her disease get so serious so fast (unless Collin had a full-blown case when he gave it to her, or because of her strained immune system due to her serious asthma), why doesn't she go down to the Catholic rape crisis centre she called the morning after her attack, after telling the sympathetic nun on the phone she'd come over, why doesn't her mother take her to get tested for AIDS, STDs, or pregnancy as soon as she tells her about the rape? She takes her out of town on a beach vacation instead? And it's suspicious how all of Sparks's young diarists have the same exact moral preachiness, similar writing styles, never say anything against their parents (or if they do they quickly take it back), never get involved in these problems by their own accord but instead are pulled in by friends who drug them, rape them, or talk them into Satanic beliefs. Nancy may be a sweet religious old-fashioned Southern girl, but surely she couldn't have been that naïve. I was a few years younger than Nancy at the time these events are going on in the early Nineties, and well remember what the climate was like at that time, people deathly afraid of getting AIDS from toilet seats or mosquito bites, people desperate for more funding for research because so many people were dying and getting sick. None of that was felt in her small South Carolina town?

It's a moving book with a powerful and important message, but I no longer view it the same way I did when I first read it and thought it was a 100% true story.