"After" by Amy Efaw

**Spoilers!**

After, by Amy Efaw, tells the story of Devon. Devon has always been the "good girl". Straight A's. Master goalie on the soccer field. Quiet and well-behaved, even with her slightly obnoxious and childish mother who goes through men just a little bit too fast. But when a new-born baby is found in a trash can behind Devon's house, left to die, and Devon is the one to blame, her life will change forever. But how could Devon herself have not known about the baby as she claims? When she was pregnant, gaining weight and throwing up? 

This was actually a really good book. I heard some bad reviews about it and wanted to see if it was as terrible as people were saying. Though really the only thing that bothered me was that Amy Efaw used too many soccer references in it. I'm kind of laughing at that now, because that's a very silly thing to think of a book. But I guess it was very soccer oriented? I did think Devon, as a character was a little useless at times, and some of her motivations were confusing me. But I know very little on the subject of the book, pregnancy and rejecting your child after birth, so I may not have the full picture.

I thought this was a really intriguing book about how far humans will go to keep their personal image. I hated Devon at the beginning. It seemed so obvious that she was pregnant, and all the things that were put up against her as evidence, mostly the details in the flashbacks, shows that she did know that it was likely she was pregnant. She even seemed to hide it from other people actively, which means that she did know! I understand that denial over traumatic events can occur, but it seemed so obvious that she knew that she was with child, and that she could have done something about it.

One of the reasons this book ended up being really satisfying for me is that at the end, Devon does realize all of the things I said above. She knows that even if she was denying it to herself, at some level she knew she was pregnant. She knew what she was subconsciously trying to do when wearing baggy clothes, or what she realized when she had cramps from sit-ups. That she knew that she had to pay and do something about almost killing her child was what really showed that Devon was still Devon. She knew she wanted the baby gone when she gave birth. She knew she was trying to make it go away by hurting the baby. If I tried to do get rid of a child in secret, I wouldn't be able to get it off my mind- that I tried to kill something as precious as a baby, but I didn't pay any consequences.

As I said before as well, I didn't like that there were so many random soccer references in the book. I get that soccer was important to Devon as a character, but would someone realistically think that everything was like soccer? I got all the little anecdotes about hard games and practicing and tough foul shots, but it kind of took me out of a story that was really about what humans can and will do and denial, and made me think it was one of those children's shorter chapter books all about some kid and his baseball team, and the conflict is all about how some other guy on another team cheat and he has to prove it or something. It just felt wrong. It was a weird tonal change in the book. I expect that from sports books, but do even professional soccer players always think in soccer metaphors, similes and analogies?