Reaction by Lesley Choyce   

Ashley drops the bomb on Zach—she’s pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. At first they try to figure things out together, but their fear and anger cause them to pull apart. Ashley is so mad at Zach when she finds out about a secret he kept from her. She tells her friends that Zach forced her to have sex with him. And Ashley’s parents? Boy are they mad, especially her father.

Zach is trying to be mature—he has to get Ashley to talk things out—look at all the options. He has to decide whether he is mature enough to become a father at sixteen, the difficulties of which he can’t imagine.

High school housekeeping: Reaction is one of the Orca Sounding series for high school readers working on their reading skills. The Lexile level is 520, which is somewhere in the third to fourth grade reading level. So Reaction is a bit easier and even a bit shorter than most novels in the series. Knowing that, I wish that the book would have continued to show Ashley and Zach making their final decision. Still, it deals with a current teen topic and shows how teens can keep changing their minds when none of the options are very good.