"Small Damages," by Beth Kephart "Dreamlike" is one word for Beth Kephart's latest novel, "Small Damages," in which an American teenager is exiled to Spain after she gets pregnant. Her percolating story emerges through Kep­hart's lilting prose in that same hazy way you'd meander through the narrow white streets of Seville in the noontime sun or confront the hot, dry winds, redolent of foreign smells and flavors, on a ranch in the Spanish countryside. The reader is lost and found and lost and found again. Following in a tradition of teenage-novel heroines, 18-year-old Kenzie is determined to have her baby, a decision neither her socially ambitious mother nor her Yale-bound boyfriend can accept. And the world surrounding Kenzie - who is meant to give the baby up for adoption in Spain, then return home as if nothing has happened - bears an air of unreality. This isn't to say Kephart doesn't paint it beautifully; it's just that everything around and even within Kenzie is shifting and unfamiliar. She cannot simply wake up and return to "normal." Normal has changed irrevocably. During my adolescence, young adult literature about sexually active teenagers tended to feature Important Moral Lessons. These were tales of teenagers falling in with bad crowds; of peer pressure; of botched abortions and the botched lives that followed. Writing for young people about sex and pregnancy seemed intended, with few exceptions, to remind us that there were terrifying and unwanted consequences to our actions, that a choice to have unprotected sex - really, any sex at all - could change a girl's life forever, and not for the better. Kephart's take is different. Kenzie is an aspiring filmmaker who has been accepted into the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. When she gets pregnant her senior year by a not un-empathetic boyfriend, Kevin, she must fight to win back the choices others want her to make or, failing that, try to make for her. The consequences of teenage pregnancy, and there are consequences, are far more nuanced here than in the books I'd read, and "Small Dam­ages" is more a coming-of-age story than a knee-jerk jeremiad against teenage sex. As much as Kenzie's mother thinks she can cover up her daughter's "mistake," and has the money and connections to send Kenzie to Spain, where what's happened can be hidden from Philadelphia society (the excuse given to others for her five-month stint abroad is to study Spanish cuisine), Kenzie is all too aware she can't go back to her old life. This is not just about her pregnancy; it also has to do with the death of her beloved father. Kenzie considers the baby inside her a link to her dad, and she is carrying on his line. Where her mother longs to forget the death of her husband and Kenzie's pregnancy, Kenzie wishes to remember. To do so, she must grow up fast. In Spain, on a ranch called Los Nietos, Kenzie falls under the tutelage of Estela, an elderly cook with a secret past of her own. Conflict arises between the two, but nurturing does as well, with Estela mothering Kenzie where Kenzie's own mother has failed. Kenzie also strikes up a friendship with Esteban, a teenage boy who tends the horses and birds, and understands things about her that Kevin does not. Throughout her stay, she has to contend with reminders from home: a too-short letter from Kevin; postcards from friends carelessly enjoying summer on the shore; calls from her mother; memories of the life she's left behind. But if Kenzie's world in Spain is a dream, the life she might have lived but for her pregnancy has become equally unreal. Her baby, on the other hand, is very much present: Kenzie addresses the growing life within her, referring to its stages of development, size and features. These details could be read as reflecting an anti-abortion bent, but in Kephart's hands, the novel is a story about choices - not only about the fate of a pregnancy, but also about finding one's own self. Jen Doll is a senior writer at The Atlantic Wire.