Once, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I had to read Richard Peck’s The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts for an extracurricular book event (shockingly, I was not very popular). My mom read most of the stuff I had to read because I left it lying around the house, and neither of us found Peck’s book very funny. Mom, in her infinite wisdom, said that putting the word “comedy” of the cover of your book is a dangerous gamble - if you’re going to do it, the book better damn well be funny.

Unpregnant has no subtitle, but it’s clearly billed as a comedy. Good news: It’s actually pretty funny! It starts out with the classic teen-peeing-on-a-pregnancy-test scene, only Veronica, our protagonist, is just as nervous about somehow screwing the test up as she is about its results. The absurdity of that feeling is genuinely amusing, and it tells us a whole lot about over-achiever Veronica. Bailey has a lot of good one-liners, and there are some truly outrageous hijinks, including (my favorite) a girl threatening a ferret with a taser. Truly, everything than can go wrong does go wrong, in the style of a raunchy comedy film.

Which is also this book’s weakness. It really does feel like a film - it’s written like one. The constant everything-going-wrong, neatly interspersed with almost identical heart-to-hearts and fights, starts to get exhausting. Occasionally things feel cliché or like they’re trying a little too hard. I started wishing for a quiet moment, something that made this book its own book instead of the novelization of a movie that does not yet exist. (By the way, that movie will exist - they already sold the film rights.) I guess that’s what happens when your authors are a writer on How I Met Your Mother (okay, makes sense) and the music editor for the film The Hate U Give (what??).

But I still think this one’s worth reading. I mean, if it’s ultimately remembered as the book that spawned a great movie - and I do think it’ll make a better movie than it did a book - that’s nothing to sneeze at. The issue at its heart is handled with nuance, tenderness, and unflinching empathy. It’s really incredibly cool that a book like this exists about abortion, and I’m especially glad that it exists for teens.