Disclaimer: I was given a free ARC of this book by Wednesday Books in exchange for a review.
I was so excited to get to read Unexpecting by Jen Bailey. I feel like there aren’t an awful lot of books about queer characters that aren’t either Traumatic or Romantic. Unexpecting centers around seventeen year-old Ben who, two months after coming out to his friends and family, finds himself hitting them with another big conversation: he’s going to be a father. Maxie, his best friend, robotics club team mate, and now the mother of his child, wants to put the baby up for adoption at the urging of her family, but Ben wants to keep him/her. His family supports him, but working to become a father comes with unexpected pressures and sacrifices. Being a parent, he is learning, is all about hard choices. Can he make the right ones?
Unexpecting has done incredibly strong characters. Each of them had very clear voices and motivations. Ben, as our narrator, in particularly was very well-realized. Unfortunately, Ben is a well-realized seventeen year-old boy who lacks a lot of emotional intelligence or self-awareness, so spending the entire book in his head was really frustrating at times. In particular, I had a really hard time understanding what Ben’s motivations were for wanting to take on being a single teen father. There were mentions of it being tied up with a lack of a father figure, first from the death of his biological father, followed by a succession of step-fathers, but the emotional core of his motivation wasn’t very clear. It almost sounded like he was angry with his father for dying, which while that is totally a way that people grieve, didn’t feel emotionally real coming from Ben. There was also lip service to feeling a sense of abandonment from his step-fathers, but I wasn’t clear on that either. He holds his current stepfather at such a distance, I wasn’t clear if that was his relationship with his other step-fathers, or if they had been close and then left, or what. Overall, Ben felt a little self-centered and superficial, which is an exceptional characterization of a teenage boy, but not necessarily a character who I enjoyed living in his head for 304 pages.
That said, the other characters in the book make it very clear that Ben is an unreliable narrator. It makes it easier to be frustrated with a character when another character is calling them out for that exact thing on the next page. I especially liked Gio, Ben’s former step-brother and current crush. Gio was dealing with his own struggles, but still kind to Ben. Even when calling him on his bullshit. Which he did a lot, which may have been why I liked him so much; I knew when Gio showed up there was going to be a reality check.
Maybe the best thing about this book, though, was what felt like the queerest thing about it: the emphasis on chosen family. Ben has a supportive mom, this isn’t about being rejected by your family because you are LGBTQIA+, but he is also surrounded by his own non-biological family the entire book. I had been very worried that, for a book whose synopsis centers around fighting the adoption of a child, chosen family and kinship ties would be overlooked, despite their very real importance to a lot of people, but especially in the queer community.
If you need your narrators/main characters to be likable, this might not be the book for you, but if you want a book where the characters feel true-to-life in all their messiness, I’d definitely suggest this one. The world needs more stories about LGBTQIA+ people in all their facets, that allows them to have all manner of joys and struggles in full, well-realized lives, and I hope this book will be the first of many that do just that.
Unexpecting will be available in bookstores in August of 2023.