Bumped by Megan McCafferty

My love for Megan McCafferty has been well documented here on Oops, so I think it is only understandable that I was literally DYING to get my hands on Bumped when I heard about it. Nevertheless, I had to wait until TLA for a friend to pick up the book and lend it to me (seeing as I barely got to make it to the exhibit hall and all), but she brought it into work and we switched. A copy of Bumped for Sloppy Firsts (which incidentally another co-worker is reading as well).

Because of all this love, I was surprised when I found Bumped a bit hard to get into at first. Was my love just for Jessica Darling and Marcus Flutie's epic 5 novel love story?

Luckily, it turns out, that my love is not only for them. I really enjoyed Bumped, although I will admit it took me longer to get into the groove of the book. That, I think, can be attributed to the fact that McCafferty invents a whole new set of slang that the characters speak and I found it a little off-putting at first (by the middle of the novel I sort of enjoyed it).

This is a future where a human reproduction virus radically limits the length of time humans (both female and male) are fertile. A huge industry of "pregging for profit" has developed so that adult aged humans can purchase children to raise as their own. Melody and Harmony her recently-discovered-separated-at-birth twin sister have grown up in radically different communities with very different opinions on how a person to live. When they are finally reunited nothing will ever be the same for them again.

I think the characterization probably suffered a bit at the expense of the set-up, but I found this to be a highly enjoyable read. I enjoyed the play on teens and pregnancy and what a future might look like if teens were the only ones who could procreate.

I actually had a hard time not comparing it to Wither by Lauren DeStefano the whole time I was reading since they had such incredibly different takes on the same premise (how interesting that these both came out this year - new trend alert?). I have to say, I found the ideas put forth in Bumped to be the more likely of the two. And it was funnier. So while neither Harmony or Melody resonated with me like Jessica, I will say that I would pick up a sequel if it was in the works and that I look forward to whatever McCafferty writes next.

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Book Source = Borrowed ARC