Bumped. Rating: Lamentable.

“It's human nay-cha...For me to sperminay-cha”

I have endured many nigh-unendurable things in my life, reader. I have driven across state lines in the middle of the night with my headlights off and a cyanide pill between my molars (just in case). I have successfully hidden false documents under a low-quality wig during a patdown. I once sat through a two-hour long Powerpoint presentation on Synergistic Innovation.

None of these trials come remotely close to meeting the suffering I endured in reading Bumped.

I found Bumped sitting on top of a vending machine at a rest stop. I left my copy at a different rest stop, on top of a vending machine, with an inscription that reads "Turn back now; you are making a terrible mistake."

Bumped by the vacant Megan McCafferty

...is an awful book. 

The premise is by now a cliche, but when I read Bumped, the exploitation of teen fertility was not yet a YA standby. The book is your standard plague-sterilizes-adults, people-buy-babies type of plot, but with a shining candy coat in the place of well-developed dystopian depth.

Our protagonist is named Melody, and she has a sister named (oh, reader, I am sorry about this) Harmony. They live in the future. In case you were not aware, the future features a lot of eyeball-based technology, which requires eye-rolling and blinking to control. I would be ever so pleased to get an analysis of this technology by the brilliant minds behind scifiinterfaces.com, but alas, I am left to my own devices as regards an analysis - so I will do the responsible thing and leave it at "this is bullshit". 

Melody is a fertile teen; her secret sister, Harmony, lives on a religious commune that rejects the commercialization of pregnancy but encourages young marriage. Both are white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisfemale, attractive, athletic, and intelligent. Melody's pregnancy agent (it's what it sounds like) connects her with a famous sperm donor, Harmony shows up at exactly the wrong time, there is a sitcom-worthy case of mistaken identity, and everyone learns valuable lessons about themselves.

I won't go more into the plot than that, reader, because shallow things rarely need to be thoroughly plumbed. The premise is incredibly weak, the science is threadbare, and the portrayal of religion is hackneyed at best. 

This is not what makes the book torturously bad. I can muscle through a weak premise and thin science if the characters are compelling and the writing is good. That is not the case with Bumped. The characters are not unlikable; they are merely deeply uninteresting. The problem is the writing, which is uniformly bad. Having read Bumped, I am certain that Ms. McCafferty has in fact never spoken to nor observed a living teenager. McCafferty's teens are insufferable, overstimulated, slang-saturated emoticons - effectively, they are everything the media wants parents to believe their children will become. Were this book set in 2003, they would be having rainbow parties. Were it set in 2008, they would be trading sex bracelets. They are not nuanced, troubled, thoughtful, or questioning; they are not searching for answers or identities. Instead they value what the establishment tells them to value, and they do it without hesitation.

Now, for Spoilers.

 You came here for spoilers, so spoilers you shall have. The ending is no more interesting than the book merits, and no less predictable. At the end of the book, Melody has decided that she does not want to have a baby with the famous sperm donor, and Harmony has conceived with said famous sperm donor but has retreated to her religious community to bear the child with her (here's the big twist) gay husband. Both were remarkably easy to sway from their apparently firmly-held convictions. But, reader, there's no getting around it: this book was published for a reason. Someone, somewhere, thought that there was an excuse for the incredibly one-dimensional writing.

When discussing this book, there is an elephant in the room, and he would like to talk to you about satire.

Fans of Bumped like to trumpet a notion they have, which is that it makes sense for the book to be so terrible because it is satire. Melody is intended to represent the pop culture moment of two years ago, when teen pregnancy was all over the media. You remember, reader. Sixteen and Pregnant, Secret Life of the American Teen, Teen Mom. Yes, let your mind travel back to that critical time in our shared cultural memory. Harmony is intended to represent the religious backlash against teen pregnancy during that same time period. 

Melody's decision to not have sex with a stranger for money is, of course, the big rebellion against this dystopian future society (as is Harmony's decision to have sex with someone she is attracted to, rejecting her faith's narrative of sex inside of marriage regardless of desire). The two girls' actions are intended to represent a journey to the middle of what was then being portrayed in the media as a charged, polarizing issue.

The problem with the "satire" label is, of course, that satire alone does not lend merit. Satire is a category that can explain context, but it cannot rewrite a novel. The label "satire" does not remove passages like "Just thinking about all the drama gets my tubes in a twist".

"A Modest Proposal" is satire. "The Colbert Report" is satire. "Bumped" is trash angling for redemption by means of a label it does not deserve.

Rating: Lamentable. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?