Tag: teen fiction

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Book reviews

Seema Yasmin’s Unbecoming (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

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Thanks to Islamic terrorists who kill Jews and Christians, the West realizes that Islam is the religion of killing.  Seema Yasmin’s novel reinforces that view by depicting Muslim teens who mindlessly pursue the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers just like any other abortion zealot.  Sincere Muslims, therefore, should be outraged over this propaganda posing as fiction because Islam has nothing to do with such killing and destruction of families.

There is not much more to say about this tiresome teen abortion work.  The admixture of Muslim identities and a splattering of Arabic words may be somewhat new, but the plot is typical of pro-abortion propaganda: a teenager becomes pregnant, immediately thinks that abortion is her only choice, and irrationally rambles through a couple hundred pages to obtain abortifacient pills, disregarding other life-affirming choices available to her.

In short, it’s just another failed attempt to persuade young adult readers that abortion doesn’t stop a young woman from being a mother; after an abortion, she’s merely the mother of a dead baby.

Contemporary readers will find it difficult to sympathize with a teen who wants so desperately to harm herself, kill an unborn child, and alienate herself and the unborn baby from his or her father for two other accidentals, the first accidental being the needless background of Islamic identity: the anti-Semitism and uncritical adoption of unscientific woke ideology.

Western readers, constantly aware of Islamic terrorist attacks against Jews and Christians around the world and on American college campuses and streets, would not be sympathetic to Laylah Khan, the main character, and her pansexual best friend Noor for their espousal of Islamic terrorism.  The author notes that Noor has a Palestinian flag (54) and derides her journalism teacher for his “colonizer mind” (138); Laylah herself parades a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker on her car (266).

Nor would Western readers, who know simple facts of human reproduction, appreciate the irrationality of woke ideology manifested in the characters’ assertions that abortion concerns not a woman, but a “pregnant person” (48).  For example, in arguing with another Muslim, Noor aggressively says, “let me start by explaining that it’s not only women who get pregnant, okay?  It’s anyone with a uterus, and that includes people who don’t identify as women.  Okay?” (182).

Yasmin herself makes the propaganda function of her work clear, incorporating transgender irrationality, when she writes in the first paragraph of her address to the reader that the novel is her paranoid idea of “a dystopian future in which abortions were banned across America and pregnant people and their doctors thrown into jail—or onto death row—for even thinking about ending a pregnancy” (unpaginated ix; italics added).

If the insults to Jews and reproductive science aren’t enough, Yasmin’s characters condemn crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which help women reject abortion being sold to them by businesses like Planned Parenthood, using the most ad hoministic superlatives.  The usual adjective that abortion zealots use against life-affirming CPCs appears early in the work: “the fake clinics called crisis pregnancy centers” (31).  Much later in the propaganda piece, CPCs are asserted to be “the most evil thing ever” (220) and that the people volunteering at CPCs “are beyond wicked.  The worst kind.  Pretend to be do-gooders so they can win our votes and our trust and be our role models” (228).  Another of Laylah’s condemnations of CPCs [“those fake crisis pregnancy centers where they pretend to offer you an abortion but really they’re just using the facade of the clinic to lure you in and manipulate you into keeping the pregnancy” (234)] is merely a biased, paranoid assertion.  Nowhere does the propaganda piece contain a passage supporting her irrational claims.

Given such hatred against CPCs, the astute reader must conclude that life-affirming pregnancy resource groups must be cutting into the profits of the abortion business.  Why else would mere teenagers mouth such ridiculous and unproven assertions?

Instead of reading this mere propaganda with a Muslim twist, I recommend readers curl up with some great contemporary women’s literature on abortion, such as T. M. Gaouette’s For Eden’s Sake (review posted here: https://www.drjeffkoloze.com/t-m-gaouettes-for-edens-sake-2019/).

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Book reviews

Annie Cardi’s Red (Union Square, 2024)

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Annie Cardi may be just another abortion activist trying to influence teens through fiction to accept abortion (which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers), but she has given birth to a wonderfully hopeful and therefore pro-life novel.

Finally, a pro-abortion novel which shows that even the most abortion-minded teen can become a Dr. @AbbyJohnson…someday.

Of course, Cardi meets the criteria of a typical pro-abortion author (how else can anyone get published in the New York abortion literary establishment?).  When she writes in the “Author’s Note”, “I grew up Catholic, and the Church is clear about its negative view of reproductive rights.  That, along with other official Church views, didn’t sit right with me” (246), her pro-abortion credentials begin because being a fallen-away Catholic is a definite plus in said abortion literary establishment.

Moreover, Cardi uses the language of abortion (including, of course, woke) zealots consistently.  Her main character mentions twice that she is a staunch abortion activist not merely by “volunteering” for, presumably, a non-profit, but also aiding and abetting the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which passes itself off as a non-profit organization.  “I’m spending the summer volunteering at the Wolfwood women’s center and phone banking for Planned Parenthood” (240) is reinforced by a second reference to “volunteering with the women’s center and Planned Parenthood” (243).

Similarly, when she writes about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Cardi’s acceptance of unscientific woke language on gender may jar the reader, but is a seal of approval to the New York abortion literary establishment: “Now, in many states, pregnant people are at risk of being denied health care options” (246).  Pregnant “people”?  Cardi must think that men can become pregnant.

Finally, Cardi’s credentials with the New York abortion literary establishment are secure when she lists only pro-abortion entities on the “Resources” page (248).  This feature of fiction designed to steer teen readers into abortion businesses is the twenty-first century abortion zealot’s version of “Irish need not apply” or, in this case, “Birthright, Live Action, National Right to Life, and (for the post-abortion woman) Rachel’s Vineyard (@RVHealing) need not apply”.

These surface details are more interesting than the plot itself, which tries to instill more substance in what is a typical teen abortion novel by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the premiere pro-life novel of world literature.  One key difference between Hawthorne’s and Cardi’s novels, of course, is that Hester Prynne did not kill the unborn child whom she conceived with Rev. Dimmesdale, while Cardi’s Tess Pine aborts the child fathered by her church’s youth minister, Alden.

Granted, the few allusions to Hawthorne’s life-affirming novel can be fun to perceive, satisfying the first essential future of literature to generate pleasure in the reader.  Although it becomes obvious that Alden was the father of the aborted child because he is relieved that Tess, like Hester, refuses to disclose his paternity (97-8), some pleasure derives from reading “When I do fall asleep, I dream about a giant comet streaking across the sky, turning everything orange and purple and red, waiting for it to fall to earth and destroy everything” (195), which matches the meteor incident in the twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter.

And yet, however much it strives to become an updated, twenty-first century version of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Cardi’s teen abortion novel is not a literary epic; it’s merely another teen abortion novel.

Since Tess’ abortion is mentioned on the first page of this 244-page attempt to mirror Hawthorne’s masterpiece, making whatever follows a slow, tedious slide to a presumably anti-life denouement, there are, however, many lines which pro-life readers can use to understand aborted women.  For example, Tess’ ambivalence about the word “abortion” is manifested on the first page: ‘That’s what we call it, though—‘the procedure.’  We don’t call it what it is.  It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse.  Maybe it is” (1).

Likewise, Tess’ post-abortion syndrome manifests itself just as early in the novel: “I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by.  Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever” (7).  This metaphor appears towards novel’s end, which demonstrates that the loss of either her innocent youth or the aborted child is subconscious throughout the novel: “Even if I wouldn’t change my decision, I remember that feeling I had after the procedure, of a ghost ship sailing past, and I think it’s something that will stay with me forever” (188).

It is incredibly sad, therefore, that Tess doesn’t yet realize that her abortion did not move her on a calculus of “last weekend, I went from being pregnant to being not-pregnant” (26), but from being the mother of an unborn child to the mother of a dead one.  Just as sad is the sense of hopelessness that mothers, especially teen mothers, must feel when they think their only choice is to kill the unborn child, as when Tess concludes that aborting the child “felt like the only way to get my life back to something resembling normal” (42).

Fortunately, for the fictional Tess as for all women who collaborated in the aborting of unborn babies, there is great hope.  Tess the fictional character mirrors real aborted mothers who still want to pray, join a community of believers, and have a relationship with God.  Tess often states, “I liked the idea that something bigger was watching over us, even while we were mini golfing, and that we were all connected because of it” (22).  Over a hundred pages later, Tess reiterates that, when she prays, “I felt connected to something larger and more powerful and mysterious, and all of that feels gone now.  I don’t know if I left it behind or if it left me, but it’s a loneliness that feels like a growing empty space in the middle of my chest” (138); a page later, “it’s part of me, deep down, and I feel ashamed to even want it, to know that God is still there and would listen to me, even now, but I do” (139).  Towards novel’s end, Tess’ prayers become deeper as when she says, “I miss you, I add to the end of my prayer, not even knowing what that means exactly, but maybe whoever’s listening does” (155; italics in original).  Although there are more instances of spontaneous prayer, here’s a final time where the idea of a faith community offers her connectedness despite the abortion: “I want to reconnect with a faith I had, to talk to God again and be a part of something larger than myself.  And I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong, exactly.  But that doesn’t mean I would go back and make a different decision” (173).

The novel’s denouement is ambiguous, appropriate for a pro-abortion character who has not yet found her place as a pro-life activist: “And maybe someday, I’ll decide it’s the right time to be a mother, and I will give my whole heart to that new person” (244).  Although her assertion of future possibilities would make abortion zealots foam at the mouth since it affirms heterosexual normativity, the competent reader can see in Tess’ problematic language (one-sided since there is no mention in creating a child with a husband in a covenant relationship called marriage), this life-affirming credo makes me hope that Tess and, most likely Cardi herself (if this novel is autobiographical) can become as pro-life as Dr. Abby Johnson.

After all, if Abby could be an employee of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, have two abortions herself, and become one of the nation’s major pro-life activists, encouraging abortion “clinic” (that is, business) workers to abandon working for abortion companies, then there’s hope for pro-abortion authors like Annie Cardi, fictional characters like Tess Pine, and, most importantly, women who think that abortion is their only choice to “get their lives back to something resembling normal”.

Abby, you’ll have a new convert soon.

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Book reviews

Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.

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Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child (Kodansha, 2022)

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Although it has some moral flaws, Aoi’s novel is a quick read, depicting an ordinary Japanese teen experiencing the doubts and joys of being pregnant with her teen lover.

This graphic novel, written in Japanese manga style, can appeal to American teens who often do not read words but may be adept at “reading” the emotional power of images in cartoons, online games, or other material.

Two moral objections to the book should be discussed.  The first concerns one character who says, “There’s no right or wrong here” (60), which may say more about the character’s amorality than a recognition that abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—truths which, since they are based on natural law, apply not only to Jews and Christians in the West, but also to Japanese presumably steeped in Shinto and Buddhist traditions.

Similarly, the main character’s litany of questions about the source for moral authority [“What are the criteria for what we should do?  Is it how the people around us feel?  Common sense?  Popular opinion?” (83; italics in original)] could be a string of questions formed not so much by the character’s amorality, but by any teen faced with an untimely pregnancy.

These questions could also generate great discussion among teen students, thus serving not only a rhetorical function, but a didactic one to encourage any teen contemplating abortion to determine the reasons why abortion is always morally wrong, let alone not reproductive or somehow beneficial.

The second moral objection to the book can be located in the “Sex and Pregnancy Q&A” section, where three items of bad advice are provided to teens about sexuality and abortion.  “The easiest methods for teens are condoms and the pill”, the advice suggests, ignoring the benefits of abstinence and respect for male and female sexuality which a couple enjoys in the covenant relationship called marriage.  Also, abortifacients are misnamed “emergency contraception”; sophisticated modern Japanese young people know that an abortifacient is not contraceptive, but the chemical means to perform an abortion, which is the killing of an unborn child.  Finally, the advice that “nobody should have a say in what you want to do with your body or mind” is not only ambiguous, but also illogical; Japanese and American teens cannot avoid knowing moral restraints on sexuality coming from natural law, a divine source, or from their parents or guardians, mature people who know more about sexuality than hormone-fevered teens.

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Book reviews

Bonnie Martin’s Poppy (2022)

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Despite lugubrious paragraphs and static characters, Martin’s novel illustrates how ignorant twenty-first century young people could be about the abortion wars of the past half century before they become pro-life activists.

The paragraphs are often pages long; even dialogue is encased in the solid paragraphs and not written in lines like other novels.  Why the author chose to compose such lugubrious text cannot be determined.  Maybe she was striving to match a stream-of-consciousness of an ordinary teenaged girl?

Also, the characters are more static than dynamic.  Poppy is always obedient to her mother (slight rolling of the eyes notwithstanding).  Tucker, her classmate with whom she discusses the pro-life topics ventured in the novel, is not merely a typical handsome high school senior, but a well-balanced young man who is a faithful Catholic, pro-life activist at a crisis pregnancy center, and just a good boy.  Perhaps his only fault is that he touches his mass of hair too often.  Can any young man be that pure and holy and dripping with righteousness?  Slightly incredible say I.

Some scenes are depicted beautifully, such as the disclosure of the body of the abandoned baby (pages 250ff), which is a damning example of the callousness that some have of newborn human life.  That episode, however, concerns infanticide more than feticide, the early area of concern that Poppy has, or abortion, which she later realizes is her primary social justice issue.

While the seasoned pro-life activist would wonder how such sweet innocents, raised in a culture of high technology as ours, could be so ignorant about the controversy regarding the right to life of the unborn child, maybe that is Martin’s purpose: to reach similarly ignorant, naïve, or just plain simple-minded young teenaged girls who come to the abortion issue without the benefit of knowing the movement’s history of five decades.  If this is the author’s intent, then she may succeed with that reading demographic.