The Pregnancy Project: A Memoir by Gaby Rodriguez and Jenna Glatzer

The Pregnancy Project is a memoir by Gaby Rodriguez. Her entire family had been teen parents. She was the youngest of the group, and had been told growing up that she would be the one in the family to amount to something. That she wouldn't be a teen parent. For her senior project in high school, she fakes a pregnancy to see how her community would react. From there on, she's told she wouldn't amount to anything. That she'd ruined her life. That her boyfriend (Jorge) was going to bail on her. All this negativity, no support. Even knowing that it was fake, it would have been a horrible experience to go through. She's definitely a strong young woman.

In the beginning of the memoir, I read about Gaby's family. Her mother dropped out of school in 8th grade to have a child. It almost broke my heart to see every one of her family members struggle with the same thing over and over again. She's decided that she's not going to be another statistic early on and that very much sets the tone of the book. From page one, I can tell that she's a very brave and strong girl. At the end of the book she states 'I am just one eighteen-year-old Latina girl from an economically disadvantaged town, raised by a single mom... By society's standards, people don't expect much of me. But I'm going to prove society wrong, and I hope you'll join me. Our time has come.' It is an amazing way to end the book and really shows how much one person can make a big difference.

The book was very well written. She cowrote it with another woman, which probably improved the writing even more. I picked it up from the library one evening and would have finished it in one evening if I'd had one more hour to read. I flipped through the pages like a whirlwind. I give this book a big fat FIVE stars.


Synopsis:

It started as a school project…but turned into so much more.
Growing up, Gaby Rodriguez was often told she would end up a teen mom. After all, her mother and her older sisters had gotten pregnant as teenagers; from an outsider’s perspective, it was practically a family tradition. Gaby had ambitions that didn’t include teen motherhood. But she wondered: how would she be treated if she “lived down” to others' expectations? Would everyone ignore the years she put into being a good student and see her as just another pregnant teen statistic with no future? These questions sparked Gaby’s school project: faking her own pregnancy as a high school senior to see how her family, friends, and community would react. What she learned changed her life forever, and made international headlines in the process.

In The Pregnancy Project, Gaby details how she was able to fake her own pregnancy—hiding the truth from even her siblings and boyfriend’s parents—and reveals all that she learned from the experience. But more than that, Gaby’s story is about fighting stereotypes, and how one girl found the strength to come out from the shadow of low expectations to forge a bright future for herself.

Title: The Pregnancy Project: A Memoir
Author: Gaby Rodriguez and Jenna Glatzer
Release: January 17, 2012
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Pages: 224