A deft and poignant exploration of reproductive choices. In spite of informative sex-education classes at her private school in New Jersey, 16-year-old Sydney Biggs gets pregnant with a boy she barely knows from a nearby, less-affluent town. Her best friend, the “lean, sleek, and raven-haired” Natalia Miksa, is the only one she tells. When the girls are caught by the police for ostensibly stealing Natalia’s parents’ car to sneak out to a party, Sydney’s angry and worried mother sends her to live with her rigid (anti–processed-food) father, who thinks that a month at a wilderness adventure camp, canoeing on a lake in Ontario, will be good for her. She’s part of a group of eight campers, including Natalia, a tattooed “Youth at Risk” and two young counselors. De Gramont’s compelling coming-of-age story, often poetic, compassionately probes the dilemma of and complex choices surrounding Sydney’s pregnancy. As told from Sydney’s point of view in an authentic adolescent voice, her growing self-awareness of “what’s discovered after losing your way” is both moving and hopeful. (Fiction. 14 & up)
