Bumped (Bumped #1) by Megan McCafferty - Review

Bumped 

by Megan McCafferty

Publication Date: 04/26/11

Rating: 1 / 5 Stars

Thank you NetGalley, HaperCollins, and Balzer + Bray for the electronic ARC.

Synopsis (courtesy of Goodreads):

When a virus makes everyone over the age of eighteen infertile, would-be parents are forced to pay teen girls to conceive and give birth to their children, making teens the most prized members of society.

Sixteen-year-old identical twins Melody and Harmony were separated at birth and had never met until the day Harmony shows up on Melody’s doorstep. Until now, the twins have followed completely opposite paths. Melody has scored an enviable conception contract with a couple called the Jaydens. While they are searching for the perfect partner for Melody to bump with, she is fighting her attraction to her best friend Zen, who is way too short for the job.

Harmony has spent her whole life in religious Goodside, preparing to be a wife and mother. She believes her calling is to bring Melody back to Goodside and convince her that “pregging” for profit is a sin. But Harmony has secrets of her own that she is running from.

When Melody is finally matched with the world-famous, genetically flawless Jondoe, both girls’ lives are changed forever. A case of mistaken identity takes them on a journey neither could have ever imagined, one that makes Melody and Harmony realize they have so much more than just DNA in common.  

Review: 

I was excited to read this book, since the synopsis looked good and all the hype over it. I was sadly disappointed with Bumped when I did get to read an advanced galley.

While this dystopia is an interesting concept, I felt it fell short of bringing the "so what?" to the storyline. It seems that within the last/current/to-come months, there have been many fertility-crazed dystopian YA's that have come out (XVI, Wither - to name a few). Sadly, I felt Bumped did not bring very much to the table, in terms of having engaging characters (I will say that Zen and Melody were decent characters), a decent plot and being well written.

Within the first few pages of the book, I knew I was not a fan of the writing style - especially with all the made-up-for-the-book slang. I did not think that using "bumped" instead of referring to sex, pregnancy, and all the other normal terms, was an engaging or cutting edge/ futuristic way of talking about sex, pregnancy and breeding teens based on their genes. I actually found it rather annoying by about page 50 or so. 

I found the writing style to be choppy; specifically, when the author is switching back and forth and back and forth from Melody's perspective to Harmony's perspective. There were numerous times I had to go back to the beginning of a chapter to figure out who was narrating such and such part. And the narrative seemed to be quite rushed, so much that after I was done reading it, I was thinking to myself, there really wasn't very much happening in the book at all

There were also many lingering, pretty big questions that the author never addressed; ie, explaining the virus that causes humans to lose fertility by the age of 18, why the age of 18 specifically, how Goodside was developed/ the history or at least some background on its origins and separation from the rest of the world that became and is bumped obsessed, what happened to in-vitro fertilization and sperm/egg banks?

So, while the premise the author introduces in Bumped is quite interesting and has potential, it missed its mark in creating an enjoyable satirical dystopian story.