Freshman Forty by Christine Duval
Publication date: February 21st 2013
Genre: New Adult Contemporary
Synopsis:
When eighteen-year-old Laurel Harris discovers she’s pregnant four weeks into the start of her freshman year at prestigious Colman College, she has all intentions of telling her father. But being away at school makes it too easy to hide. And while she can’t explain to her friends, or to herself even, the reasons why she doesn’t want the baby’s father to find out about the pregnancy, the rest of her world begins to unravel.
Freshman year is hard enough. Most girls get through by forming close friendships, finding new boys and a phone call from mom or dad on Sunday. Laurel has to navigate all of it while hiding an unplanned pregnancy from a summer fling...
An imperfect heroine plagued by bad choices and haunted by the memory of her deceased mother and grandparents, readers are sure to identify with Laurel as she navigates teen pregnancy, in secret, in a remote college setting.
Awards:
-Freshman Forty took won an Honorable Mention at the New York Book Festival
-Won an Honorable Mention under General Fiction for the Beach Book Festival
*** GREAT NEWS FROM CHRISTINE ***
Freshman Forty was originally self-published, but Christine just signed a deal to have it re-released by a publishing house this fall! Follow Christine on Twitter for updates @Christineduval1 or on her Goodreads author page.
Goodreads:
My Review
5 of 5 Freshman Forty
Freshman Forty is is a great book to read. I have to say that I give big kudos to Christine for writing about a subject that people have swept under the rug. Teen pregnancy is on the rise and everyone is taking a blase attitude towards it. It really disturbs me because teenage girls need to be more proactive in protecting themselves and being educated in the ways of birth control instead of being told the morning after pill is available at your local pharmacy.
Laurel has just graduated from high school and she is enjoying her summer before she starts college. She hooks up with a guy and has some fun before hitting the books. She is serious about school because that is really all she has. Her mother and grandparents have died and her father is emotionally unavailable for her. As the summer unwinds and the start of her freshman year at school Laurel starts to feel sick. It is then that she realizes something is wrong. She goes and gets a test and finds out she is pregnant.
What Laurel does next kind of shocked me because she shuts everyone out. She does not even tell the baby's father that she is pregnant. Yes it was a hook up but still she is clearly having the baby so he has the right to know and make a decision from there. Laurel also keeps it from her dad which is not hard to do because she is away from him at school so she can hide it. But what really had me in tears was when her father finally figured it out. I got to give it to dad. He was emotionally not home but when he found out about his little girl he surprised me.
This is a must read for all girls going into college. Safe sex is the way to go because unprotected sex could lead to diseases and pregnancy.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Christine Duval has been writing creatively since the fourth grade when she penned her first short story entitled "London Terror," about the murder of a cat in London. She grew up on the North Shore of Long Island and lived in Italy twice as a teenager: once when she was sixteen in Bologna and in a small town on the Adriatic Sea called Porto San Giorgio; then in Florence when she was nineteen. Her parents wondered if she'd ever come back.
College was spent in the Finger Lakes: the inspiration for Colman, Milton, and Kashong Lake in Freshman Forty. It really is cold, wet and grey there - OFTEN! But when the sun comes out, boy is it pretty.
Life eventually took her to New York's Upper West Side, the place she'll always consider home. Though for now she resides in New Jersey with her family and a very spoiled love bird who can't decide if he's a boy or she's a girl.
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