Planet Pregnancy

For sixteen-year-old Sahara, “life and death and everything in between" depends on the color of a little stick. She waits three long minutes, praying to Jesus, Mary, and all the saints that the stick will turn blue, meaning she isn’t pregnant. Instead, the stick turns pink and Sahara’s life is changed in a heart beat. Only last week, she was voted the Dixie Queen at school, and wore a sequined gown and a tiara. She was saving money to buy a car, and dreamed of driving to Hollywood or Dollywood. Suddenly, Sahara’s life before the stick turned pink seems to belong to another girl. She feels as if she no longer lives on earth, but on another planet. Sahara faces her crisis alone, afraid to tell her mother, afraid to tell her sister, and afraid to tell her friends. After all, what would people in her small Texas town think of her? As her sister once told her, “Good girls keep their legs together." One thing’s for sure. She won’t tell Dustin, her total loser of an ex-boyfriend. She wants him out of her life for good. And so Sahara keeps her pregnancy a secret, as she struggles with three choices: “keep, give away, or lose." With heartfelt honesty and a touch of sardonic humor, Linda Oatman High’s novel in free verse takes readers inside the mind of a young woman struggling to survive an alien world that she calls Planet Pregnancy.

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