Prom Babies
by Kekla Magoon
High School    Holt    304 pp.
4/24    9781250806253    $20.99
e-book ed.  9781250806246    $11.99

The year is 2005, and high school students Mina, Penney, and Sheryl are looking forward to prom night as an opportunity to dress up, dance, and have fun with their friends. Of course, there are also their dates: Penney’s long-term boyfriend, Mina’s boyfriend of convenience, and Sheryl’s cute classmate. While their experiences that night are vastly different, they wind up at the same Planned Parenthood office having received the same news: they are all pregnant. Their decisions to continue the pregnancies form an unexpected alliance among the three, with Mina, Penney, and Sheryl vowing to look after one another and their families. Eighteen years later, their children are preparing for their prom night, with complex issues of their own. Blossom is trying to figure out how far she should go with her boyfriend. While Amber has consented to attend with her girlfriend, she still takes issue with the gender-biased nature of the prom rules—and decides to address it on a school-wide level. Cole discovers a family secret while attempting to navigate his own problematic ideas about consent. The book, which alternates among all these characters and between the two time periods, considers issues of women’s rights, misogyny, classism, and more from multiple viewpoints. There are no easy resolutions to any of these topics, but Magoon’s empathetic, sometimes humorous style will leave readers with a sense of empowerment to form their own views. Appended “reflections and resources” address the state of contemporary reproductive rights in the U.S.

From the July/August 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.