Not Hatched

For some reason I keep calling Thumped, Hatched.  I guess because of the egg on the cover and all.  Thumped is the sequel to Bumped.  That's right, SEQUEL.  The end.  Not the second in a trilogy, but a sequel!  The conclusion.  I do love a good long series, I love a love a trilogy, but it sure was nice to read this and know that it would come to a conclusion, and in this case, it was a satisfying one.  It is weird, as Rachel pointed out on the review of Bumped, that with all of its massively advanced technology, there isn't a successful way to do artificial insemination, but still, I loved these books, even more after finishing the second.  I love the questions of faith that the book brings up, I love the characters, just the whole thing.

The Shocking News....

Read Bumped by Megan McCafferty and then read this, Thomas Gets Bumped and Other Stories and you'll find out just what television cartoons are teaching our children!  I was speechless.  I didn't even know that Thomas was old enough to be interested in the ladies.
So Bumped has come up in articles and blog posts with Delirium and Matched and Wither, that was how I learned about it.
It took awhile to finally get a copy and at first I couldn't get into it.  But that only lasted four pages.  After that, I was hooked.  I heard the giant sucking sound of me being pulled into a book and Bumped had me.  Dystopia again, but this time, with humor, which I haven't seen before and which I really appreciated.  As much as the future world of Bumped is awful, the characters are multi-dimensional and they have fun like...well, like real people!  Melody and Harmony and twin, separated at birth, now sixteen, living in two very different world.  Melody is a Pro...meaning that she is contracted to professionally "bump" with a another genetically-awesome teen, carry the baby to term and sell it to a couple.  The reason that older couples can't have children of their own is that most of the world has a virus which makes them unable to reproduce after the age of eighteen.  Melody's genes are SO fine that she has landed a big money deal, and at the start of the book she is just waiting for her agent to let her know which pro she'll be bumping with, in order to get that baby for the rich couple who want it.
Harmony is a Church girl, living in Goodside, raised by very conservative Church folks in a community that marries off their children at a young age.  When Harmony discovers that she has a twin, she leaves Goodside for Otherside, to try to convert Melody.
Both girls are more complex than they seem, though and this book raises some great questions about faith and sex and love and the way that society and the media impact all of us.  I loved this book and can't wait until the next.  I can't compare it to the others...but I will say that it was refreshing to find some humor in a dystopian book and that helped to make this book a stand out.