This wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but I liked it. Hannah is a pregnant fifteen year old. Aaron is the new boy in school, and through a series of circumstances that are actually more plausible than I thought they would be, he ends up volunteering to be the father of her baby, to help guard her reputation and support her while the real father is, er, out of the picture. No average teenage boy would do this, and there is a plausible reason (I think) why Aaron does it.
But really, implausibility isn’t really a concern for me most of the time. I’m famously willing to leap tall plot holes in a single bound if the rest of the story delivers. What really knocked a star off this book for me was the way the (platonic) relationship developed between Aaron and Hannah. I thought Pratt skipped several steps in their friendship. I wanted to see more interactions between them, I wanted to see how this supposedly close bond of best friendship evolved. But we don’t really get that, mostly it’s just skipping from them being acquaintances, to Aaron offering to be the pretend father of her baby (for spoilery reasons), and then to him being basically family to her. I liked what I did see, but I wanted to see more. Especially since this is a book about friendship and how it forms. I also thought the ending needed a bit more. It felt abrupt and a little unfinished.
I don’t know, maybe I’m being too hard on it, and friendships just happen sometimes, if you meet the right people in the right circumstances.
All in all, not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll be picking up any more of Non Pratt’s books.
[3.5 stars]
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