Too Soon for Jeff (3) (Hamilton High True-To-Life)

I didn't think I was going to like this book. Based on the cover copy and the first chapter, I suspected this was going to be a typical adolescent social-problem novel, the literary equivalent of an after-school special, written for the express purpose of luring youth with the promise of something vaguely forbidden (you can't write a novel about teenage pregnancy without at least alluding to how pregnancy happens in the first place), then scaring them into a change of behavior - in this case, sexual responsibility.To some extent, that's exactly what this novel is. The opening chapters are so eagerly confessional, it's condescending. Reynolds tries to hard to establish a rapport with the reader, and it shows. I felt vaguely uneasy, as if a seventeen-year-old stranger were telling me his entire life story, including how much he enjoyed sex with his girlfriend, while implicitly begging me to like him. Perhaps for less sophisticated readers, or those closer to Jeff's age range, this sort of thing works, but it made me cringe. Occasional patches of writing at once cheesy and preachy ("even though [my house] looked exactly the same as it always had, if Christy really was pregnant, nothing would ever be the same again") didn't help at all.After a few chapters, however, I found myself really getting involved in the story. Once the condescending confessional tone eased up and I didn't have it shoved down my throat every fifteen seconds that this is a book about a regular kid JUST LIKE YOU, dear reader, and the author (who was in her late fifties at the time this novel was published) TOTALLY understands what it's like to be a regular kid JUST LIKE YOU facing REAL problems JUST like the ones you and your friends face, I couldn't help liking Jeff. This is no small accomplishment on Reynolds's part, as Jeff spends the first quarter of the book urging his pregnant girlfriend to have an abortion, which I unequivocally believe to be a moral evil. Jeff is a fairly well realized character, not just a sentient penis on which to hang a tale of teen fatherhood; his interests and friendships outside of his relationship with Christy are developed in some detail. His struggles are understandable and realistic. He's neither a perfect saint nor a perfect cad. He's believable at every step of his journey from resistant father-to-be to devoted-but-struggling daddy.Christy's journey is believable as well, from naivete (she expects getting pregnant to solve all her problems) to withdrawal (she can barely stand to look at her son after he's born) to reasonably competent motherhood. In fact, Reynolds's treatment of the issue of teen parenthood is very true to life. She neither glamorizes nor catastrophizes at any step of the way. Sex is treated honestly, though never graphically and rarely gratuitously. All the complexity of sexuality is on display here, from tenderness to escapism, from sweet to funny to sad. Jeff and Christy have to modify their plans and dreams after Ethan is born, and this means making some real sacrifices, but Reynolds resists the temptation to dwell solely on the negatives or to portray teen parenthood as a dead end, while still still making it clear that it's anything but a wise choice.I was bothered by the attitudes of some of the characters on the matter of abortion - not that I have a problem with an author creating characters whose opinions are different from mine, but that her own bias in the matter clearly shows. Only two characters express anti-abortion sentiments - Christy's domineering, sometimes tyrannical father, obviously a knee-jerk devout Catholic although it's never stated outright, and Christy herself, whose horror at the thought of abortion comes less from any religious or moral conviction than from a fear of her dead baby's ghost haunting her forever. Obviously Reynolds believes in "choice," but is it necessary to make the decision to carry a pregnancy to term look like such an irrational one?I can't say that "Too Soon for Jeff" is the best young-adult novel I've ever read, but it's far from the worst. There's a lot of food for thought here, a decent story with engaging, realistically flawed characters. This would be a good book for parents and young teens to read together.

Being a teen mom, I found this book very helpful to understand my son's father's point of view. Like Christy I was TOTALLY against aborion and we struggled quite a lot with that issue. We are no longer together, sadly to say, but I feel like if I would have read this book sooner, it could have helped us to work things out instead of fighting all of the time. I would strongly recommend this book to many teen moms that feel stranded, and like they are the only one out there in this position.