Let me premise this review with a little about my feelings toward mature information in young adult stories- I am not a teacher who feels censorship is right. I am not a person who stops students from reading mature books. I am not an adult who thinks young adults can't handle or will be swayed negatively by difficult topics. The only thing I require is that the mature situations are handled well, or in a way that will help the child see the moral of the scenario. I don't like when serious situations are trivialized or treated as a joke. Sadly, that is how I feel Megan McCafferty handled the terrifying notion of forced teenage pregnancy (mostly for profit) in Bumped.
Harmony and Melody were twins separated at birth. In a world where a virus has made most people infertile by age 18, children are being persuaded to have babies and sell them. Melody was adopted by a couple who instantly recognized the profit to be made by establishing a birthing contract for their daughter. They were pioneers in the "pregg for profit" business where girls score contracts with wealthy parents who desperately want babies. Harmony was adopted and raised by a cult-like religious group called Goodside who encourage marriages as young as 13 in order to produce as many "God-like" babies as possible before the fateful age when the virus kicks in.
Neither situation is perfect, but it is the product of a world where the virus dictates the population. When Harmony abandons Goodside and tracks down Melody, life becomes a little less clear for both sisters. Despite her groundbreaking contract with the Jaydens, Melody has never "bumped" (gotten pregnant) due to their hesitancy in locating the proper father of the baby. In school, she is starting to become irrelevant as girls get younger and younger with their first pregg and her friends work on their second and third deliveries. She desperately wants to bump, but the Jaydens have to pick a guy first. Harmony has come to Otherside to find her sister and bring her back to Goodside. What she isn't admitting to Melody or herself is that she is really running away from life at Goodside where she simply doesn't belong.
When Melody's agent, Lib, contacts her to tell her the Jaydens have scored the ultimate guy for her to bump with, Jondoe, he doesn't realize he is actually talking to Harmony. Harmony then meets with Jondoe and takes off with him, discovering there is more to this beautiful man than just an incredible fertility rate. When Melody finds out, she also begins to see the ugly side of babies for hire. Now she has to decide between her amazing contract and the nagging feeling that selling babies just isn't right. Harmony has to decide between a man she feels more connection to than her own husband and the life and morals she was raised with.
When I picked up this book, I was excited about the premise- it seemed really interesting. When I started reading, I spent the first 50 pages or so completely confused and bogged down by campy jargon that was completely unnecessary and made the book feel very cheesy (e.g. pregging, fertilicious, FunBumps, janky, reproaesthetic, maSEX, etc.). Then the book started to really bother me. At first I thought I was being silly about a book filled with teenage pregnancy when it is clearly trying to show the pitfalls of those pregnancies- not glorify them. I have never had a problem with teenage pregnancy in YA lit in the past, though, so that didn't make sense. Then I realized my problem- it was making a serious situation into a campy joke. The ridiculous jargon, absurd songs trying to get girls to bump and repopulate, and easy talk of drugs that are essentially roofies to "loosen girls up" made a mockery of a tale that could have been very serious and tactfully delivered. I am totally fine with fun, light stories using puns and silliness, but you can't have it both ways. You can't choose a super serious topic and "fun it up" with silly names and outfits.
I absolutely had a problem with the casual references to drugs to persuade girls to have sex. I was also horrified by the casual references to the masSEX parties that the cheerleaders attend where they literally have sex with tons of guys to ensure they all get pregnant together. These references would have been fine if they had been handled seriously, but they were trivialized. By the end of the story, the main characters started to make some revelations about society, but it was almost too little too late at that point. The damage was done. It was the equivalent of making a fun-spirited musical of the Holocaust- tactless.
So I can honestly say I was not impressed by this book. I am a teacher who has stuck up for books by Patricia McCormick, Julie Ann Peters, Sherman Alexie and others who talk about sex, teenage pregnancy, gay teens, bullying, suicide, eating disorders, masturbation, rape, etc. and I haven't seen anything wrong with those stories, because they handle their topics tactfully. This book was just silly. There is just too much out there in the YA world that is done BEAUTIFULLY to waste a student's time with a book like this one.
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