Megan McCafferty's Bumped has been getting hype up the wazoo. I've heard almost nothing but good things about it - you know, good world building, topical issues, young adult dystopian (which instantly makes me think of The Hunger Games - I expect every YA dystopian novel to be as good as Suzanne Collins's, I guess), inventive language - and I was practically drooling thinking of reading this book.
Only, then I got it, and I found that the things everyone was talking about and praising, like the way McCafferty doesn't do an "info dump" at the start of her novel to explain her world and the lives and vocabulary of her characters, drove me nuts. Sure, giving a chapter of exposition isn't the most gripping way to open a novel, but not everyone can pull off making this information an organic part of their story. Then there are some people who don't even try, at all - and as a reader it felt to me that McCafferty gave up on building a strong world, resting her story instead of the questionable strengths of its storyline and wacky vocabulary.
Bumped takes place in a vaguely future version of our world, in which an AIDS-like virus causes most men and women to become infertile once out of their teens. Teenagers thereby become responsible for the propagation of the human race, "bumping" as amateurs or professionals to produce babies that are adopted or purchased by older couples. Pregnancy isn't just a way of life but a fashion; girls can purchase not just t-shirts about "pregging" and being "fertilicious" but fake baby bumps to wear.
McCafferty's narrative flips back and forth between Melody and Harmony, sixteen-year-old identical twins separated at birth who have grown up in cultures that treat teenage pregnancy differently. Melody has grown up in "Otherside", as Harmony calls it, raised by parents who believe in the move to monetize pregnancy. She's the first girl in her school to turn "professional", though two years after signing her contract she hasn't "bumped" and is nearing obsolescence.
Harmony grew up in "Goodside", a strict community of "Godfreaky" (as Melody would put it) people who marry and preg young but raise their children themselves. Harmony contacts Melody and unexpectedly shows up in Otherside, where she hangs around with Melody and her friend Zen.
So, not a bad premise for a young adult novel, though aspects of it are contrived enough that I should have guessed I wouldn't fall in love with the book the way everyone else has. McCafferty hasn't formed her story around a cast of deluded teenagers as much as she's thought of caricatures to place into her narrative. Melody, Harmony, Zen, Melody's friends and their pregnancies, Melody's parents, Harmony's huge extended family - none of them feel real to me, but rather as if they've been put in this narrative to stand as examples of or for something.
McCafferty comes up with a lot of future words and slang for this novel, which I started writing down halfway through - "paps" for papparazzi, "foto" for photo, "Avatarcade" (future version of the arcade, with avatars!), "GlycoGoGo Bars" (energy bar), "US Buff-A" (restaurant), "Mi-Net" (crazy future internet, accessed with contact lenses and earbuds), "pro boner work" (instead of "pro bono work" - well, this one was kind of funny I guess), "procreationists" (Christians who believe in spreading the seed), "starcisstic" (instead of narcissistic), "breedy bits" (you know), "facespace" (speaking to a person in person), "MasSEX parties" (orgies). These words seem to stand in the place of world building (McCafferty doesn't build a world as much as she suggests, via future words, that she has built a world), and McCafferty's characters seem just as superficial as her world and its language.
Over at the blog I Swim for Oceans there's a pretty interesting interview with McCafferty in which she talks about some of these things, like why her characters speak the way they do and how that changes over the course of the novel. All my notes about this book are kind of disappointed scribbles (e-bookishly speaking) about how she goes for the most obvious ways to distinguish her characters. Harmony's grown up in a Godfreaky community, so her internal monologue is filled with references to God and the Bible, while Melody's is more along the lines of wondering whether she is "fertilicious" and what she will look like with a baby bump. McCafferty lays this on thick early in the book, and it fades away as time passes. Like she says in the interview, McCafferty used that sort of internal monologue to show character development - as the narrative progresses the girls are finding their own voices and freeing themselves from the voices their families and cultures have given them - but this reads, like so many other aspects of the novel, as superficial and contrived, because this use of the language is the only way McCafferty chooses to show character development, and also because Bumped takes place over such a short time period that this shift in internal monologue isn't believable.
Bumped deals in issues that are pretty heavy - questions about who owns the rights to their own bodies, how teenagers' bodies are taken advantage of when it becomes the only way of surviving as a race, monetizing sex and pregnancy - but the tone of the novel doesn't fit these issues. At novel's end the characters are rethinking their world and their places in it and how they treat their bodies, but the decisions they reach about these issues largely take place behind the scenes. As readers, we see little deeper than the slang they use to express themselves. The disconnect between the subject matter and the voice is huge and distracting, and lets down this story and the potential it had. McCafferty drowns what could have been an interesting and thought-provoking story beneath her top-heavy world - developed in terms of language and fashion but feeling barren in every other way.
