According to this website the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate out of all industrialized countries. The Center for Disease Control says that one-third of teens get pregnant before the age of 20. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says that there are “750,000 teen pregnancies annually. Eight in ten of these pregnancies are unintended and 81 percent are to unmarried teens.” You may ask, what do these statistics have to do with books? Bumped
In the future, (I don’t remember how far…) there’s a virus that doesn’t allow women to become pregnant. I believe at the age of 18, you become infertile (if you’re a woman). Because of this, the world has had to rely on teenage girls to repopulate the Earth. And the effects are crazy. Becoming pregnant makes you one of the most popular girls in school; you get paid crazy amounts of money to have a baby for someone. It’s crazy. Harmony and Melody are two teenage girls growing up in this crazy time. Melody has signed a very expensive contract to have a baby for a very rich couple, but she hasn’t been “bumped” yet. Harmony is a girl from Goodside, which is the Christian Church that is very against all this teenage pregnancy and sex before marriage. Harmony has come to convince Melody of the Christian ways, but everything doesn’t go as planned. For either girl. Crazy events ensue, events that expose the craziness of a society where a pregnant teen is worshipped.
At first this book is a little off-putting because it glorifies teenage pregnancy. But you come to realize, it’s doing this to show how completely wrong it is. It’s almost like a satire…at least that’s how I read it. Our society really does have a problem with teenage pregnancy, as can be seen in the first paragraph. I didn’t really like it at first because it did bother me that these teenage girls wanted to be pregnant so badly. But as I got farther into the novel, I liked it better because I realized how ridiculous it really was. People don’t really act like that (at least they don’t now. Maybe they will in the future. I don’t know). So overall, this was a pretty good book. I got Harmony and Melody confused a few times, but other than that it was a pretty smooth read.
What am I reading next? Chime