**0.5 stars rounded up** TW: rape
DISCLAIMER: I am pro-choice. Ladies, do whatever you want with your bodies. It's not my, or anyone else's, decision to make.
God, if I could rate this book 0 stars, I would.
This fucking monstrosity made me physically nauseous. It's not often that I get a physical reaction from a book, and usually, it's just tears or maybe a pang in my stomach because of anticipation. This one made me want to hurl my guts out.
Unpregnant is about Veronica Clarke, the perfect model student who gets accidentally pregnant and has to go on a road trip with her ex-best friend, Bailey, to an abortion clinic where her parents won't find out. That sounds like a pretty decent story, right?
Well, so did I. But, as you can tell by now, I was wrong.
The reason why Veronica accidentally got pregnant was because of her ex-boyfriend, Kevin, who poked holes in his condom because he didn't want Veronica to move away to college from Missouri to Rhode Island. On top of that, he even proposed to her to "trap" her, and he stalked Veronica and Bailey all the way to the clinic in New Mexico.
The reason why Veronica had to go all the way to New Mexico was that, in the state of Missouri, you need a parent's permission to get an abortion. That wasn't an option for Veronica, as her parents are very religious, very Catholic, and they believed that abortion was murder and a sin.
The reason why this book made me want to hurl was that Bailey and Veronica treated this road trip to New Mexico as a "girls' trip" and treated it as an adventure. Sure, you might want to make the victim feel a bit better, but this book was just absolutely ridiculous. They went to a strip club, had their car stolen, trespassed on private property to climb an elephant sculpture, went cow-tipping and much more ridiculous things like that. The authors played off this extremely traumatizing event as nothing and used it as a book version of the show Just for Laughs: Gags.
Bailey Butler also came out as a lesbian in this novel, which was used entirely for the furthering of Veronica's character. Everything that happens in the book is for the furthering of Veronica's character, and everything conveniently happens to help our Veronica and Bailey. They played off this whole event as nothing, and at one point, Bailey even called Veronica something along the lines of "whore" and "you should have kept your pants on and legs together." If Veronica was actually written like a real character instead of this, I don't know what to call it because it is just so so terrible, that would have been the tipping point for her. Veronica should have been dealing with trauma in a normal way, not going on a coming-of-age movie road trip.
The decision of abortion was also played down in this book as well. Bailey made fun of abortion and Veronica making the decision to have sex the entire book, and it was just harmful and adding to the stigma that there already is around abortion.
The ending was also terrible as well. Veronica and Bailey decided to get nachos after Veronica's abortion, and then they see Kevin at the same nacho place (because Kevin decided to show up at the abortion clinic and use it as another stupid excuse to keep Veronica and him together) and Bailey and Veronica steal his car. And their excuse when Kevin confronts them? "Well, you did all this, so the least you can do is let us borrow your car." No! You should have gone to the police like a normal person! He stalked you the entire time!
Having an abortion can also be a traumatizing experience depending on who you are, but not for Veronica! She went up to her ex-best friends at the end of the novel and went "yeah, I got an abortion, Kevin essentially raped me, no biggie lol" and went off to sit with Bailey. Um?????? Excuse me??
I might be able to understand that one may add comedy into a story of extremely traumatizing events, toxic people, and even self-discovery, but this? This is a fucking disgrace to books.
I have so much more to say, but if I said all of it you would be sitting here for a while reading my angry ramblings. But the TLDR is: don't read this fucking monstrosity.
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2020-08-11
EDIT: I seriously cannot believe that they're making this into a movie. I mean, come on! Read the room!