Thumped

*gasps for air*
Yes, yes, I'm still alive, I promise. And been doing lots of reading! I've just been buried under a mountain of schoolwork. And yes, while I should have finished the memoir I'm supposed to have read by tonight at 6, I decided to read something else:

Thumped by Megan McCafferty

I didn't realize it until just now, but the one other time I blew off end-of-semester work for a book was when Perfect Fifths (another Megan McCafferty book) came out. So it says a lot about my love for this woman.

So Thumped is the sequel to Bumped, which follows twin sisters, Melody and Harmony, in a world where a virus has made it such that most people become infertile by age 18. So, in order to keep the population up, teenagers are encouraged to get "bump" and "preg" for profit. Harmony was raised in a religious community called Goodside, where traditional values prevail, and Melody was raised to be millionaire pregger. When the two meet for the first time, both Melody and Harmony are forced to re-examine your value system.

While reading Thumped, I often felt uneasy, and I was unsure if I really liked the book or not. But once I realized that while it may be billed as a dystopia, it doesn't fit into that traditional category of YA dystopias. Oh sure, many of the same elements are there, but there's something very different about Thumped.

First, a random aside: the slang in this world is extremely well developed. While I love dystopias, I usually find the imaginary slang in them to be a bit forced. But the slang in this series is flows very naturally. It takes a few chapters to get used to, but once you do, it really adds to the setting rather than detracts from it like slang in other dystopias.

Now to the good stuff...
What separates Thumped from other dystopias is how closed in it feels. Chapters switch between Melody's and Harmony's point of view. And as things happen around them and they're confused by it all, so are we. The story is very personal: unlike a lot of dystopias, it's not focused on criticizing some aspect of our current society. True, the story was inspired by all the media attention the girls on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom were getting, but to say that teen pregnancy is glamorized in this country is an overstatement. Anyways, my point here is that Thumped is not some grand commentary about how depraved society has gotten. It's about what happens when people live in a world that is the completely opposite of what it was a generation ago. The Virus in the story is fairly new (less than 50 years old), so there are generations of people who still remember the way things used to be. Melody and Harmony are part of a generation who need to figure out their place in a changed world. So the story is not about taking down a Big Bad, merely changing the way people view the world. It's not about the end of a revolution, but the start of one. Society doesn't change totally overnight.

And what I love is that the ending of Thumped is somewhat ambiguous. I mean, you come away knowing that the characters have made the right choices and that certain things are going to change, but there hasn't been some magic cure to the Virus. Harmony still knows she's got a long way to go. Melody's not entirely sure what her life is going to be now. But that's okay. Because that's how life works. And there's still enough of a sense of newness about this world that you as the reader are satisfied because you know there's room to grow. There's optimism, and for such a personal story, optimism is enough.

Both Bumped and Thumped are quite different from a lot of YA dystopias out there. And that alone makes them worth the read.