A few minutes later, a police officer comes knocking on the door with his partner, because they're canvassing the place. Her mom's kind of flaky, so she doesn't even notice how sick Devon is, just semi-chastises her for missing school and launches into a story of how they'd found a baby in the dumpster just outside their apartment complex. The book opens with her mom coming home from her bartending job and Devon lying in the couch almost unconscious. It's about this girl, Devon, who dumps her baby in the trash. (The publisher asked for a review to be posted around the pub date, which is in August, which means I won't get around to it for a while. **A PSEUDO REVIEW FOR THOSE WONDERING WHAT THIS IS ABOUT** I'd love to read a thoughtful, feminist exploration of a girl in denial of her sexuality, her pregnancy, her labor and childbirth. I am so angry that a girl who's gone through so much pain, physically and emotionally, who is obviously in need of psychiatric counseling and perhaps a foster family who will be there for her, casts all of that aside to teach us a tidy little lesson about What We Ladies Owe To Our Babies. It's about giving birth and being a mom to a baby no matter how you feel about that pregnancy.ģ. It's not about making choices you're actually OK with. It's not about being a good, loving parent that's important, noooo. It reads like anti-choice rhetoric to me. I suppose we're allowed to believe up until then Devon had just been unfair and one-sided, but for me it was frustrating watching after pages and pages of letting us know how effing whorey and bad-mom-y Devon's mom was, and then being told that was all OK because at least the mom had had Devon and changed her diapers and stuff. Just saying.) Also, and this is tied up with a forthcoming issue I had, the revelation Devon has about her mom toward the end is really unfair in my opinion. If there's a stereotype about a whore/bad mother not included here, I'd like to hear it. If I wanted that I'd just watch Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which at least has theatre actors in guest-starring roles and bizarro plotlines that make me laugh.Ģ.

The juvenile detention/courtroom procedures were hardly the most intriguing part of this story to me, and yet that's the majority of what we got. I always deem it slightly unfair of me to say a book should have been written in a different way, since that's not my job as a reader to decide.

After by amy efaw