Unpregnant

Veronica Clarke has long prided herself on her perfection: perfect grades, perfect friends, perfect boyfriend, perfect college acceptance. Perfect life. But all that shatters when Veronica discovers that she’s pregnant, despite having taken the proper precautions. Veronica does not want to have a baby. She does not want to be pregnant. The only recourse is to have an abortion, but doing so will involve driving nearly a thousand miles away. Veronica can’t tell her family or even her friends. Instead, she turns to the friend she ditched four years ago: Bailey. Together, they devise a simple plan that can–and does–go wrong in a million, unanticipated ways. But along the way, the two just might patch up a once-close friendship.

The novel Unpregnant, by Jenni Hendriks and Ted Caplan, manages to take a highly stigmatized topic and bring it into the light, and in the process create a story that is both hilarious and beautiful. Veronica is a high school girl many of us can identify with on some level, living her dream years and perhaps being just a bit cruel in the process of attaining her goals. Bailey is a perfect anti-hero; we all knew someone like her in high school, or maybe embodied some of her qualities ourselves. Their adventure is the stuff movies are made of, and readers will enjoy every page!