Fiction That’s No Stranger to Truth : Books: New novel focuses on teen-age pregnancy. The author, an English teacher, says she surveyed students at her high school and found 25% of the girls were either pregnant or had a child.

Her carefree days are about to end and her problems are about to begin. Emmy is 15 and pregnant.

Emmy is a fictional character who is a lot like Marilyn Reynolds’ students, and that is why the Alhambra teacher decided to write about her.

In her latest novel, “Detour for Emmy,” Reynolds, an English teacher at Century High School, chronicles the obstacles faced by a teen-ager once she learns she is pregnant. Against the wishes of her mother and boyfriend, she ultimately decides to keep the baby.

During her 21 years of teaching at the continuation high school, Reynolds has known many girls who faced the same dilemma. She said she wrote the book so that girls would be able to read about someone like them.

“I think we all seek out stories that we can relate to and shed some light on our own lives,” said Reynolds, 57, who lives in Altadena with her husband, a music teacher at San Gabriel High.

“It makes it easier for them to learn from somebody else’s story. . . . In fiction, a person can get caught up in a character, and then they don’t have to be defensive about their own lives.”

Reynolds read parts of her novel to her students as she was writing it, and she talked with some of the 34 students in the district’s Pregnant Minors Program.

Century High Principal Jacqueline Coulette, who heads the Pregnant Minors Program, said she plans to put Reynolds’ novel on the school’s bookshelves.

In the middle of Reynolds’ novel, when Emmy is about three months pregnant, she talks to a teen-age mother of a 6-month-old. Emmy asks, “When are you going back to school?” The girl replies, “I’m not going back to school. I don’t have nobody to watch my baby.”

Day care for young mothers is a problem that the district faces head on, said Coulette, who surveyed the 250 students at the school and found that 25% of the girls were either pregnant or had a child.

“It’s getting more common,” Coulette said. “Girls are getting pregnant younger and younger. Some of the girls who get pregnant drop out, but many do stay in school, and the district tries to make it possible for them to do that.”

The school’s Infant Care Center aids girls with babies. It provides the mothers time with their children, in addition to classes and a session on parenting.

“A nurse is one of the teachers in that program,” Coulette said, “so the girls get a lot of information and a lot of parenting tools. The teachers work very hard to try to get them so they’re more sensitive to their child’s education and the child’s self-esteem and sense of security.”

“Detour for Emmy” is not the first novel for juveniles written by Reynolds. Her first book, “Telling,” published in 1989 by Peace Ventures Press, was prompted by her memory of being molested by a family acquaintance as a teen-ager, she said.

“I know that reading in many ways allowed me to grow into a much more complete person than I would have if I had not been a reading person,” Reynolds said. “Again, I didn’t have anything on my bookshelves that related to that most common problem. If kids are going to read or write, it has to have some meaning for them. So I try to have the curriculum that is meaningful.”

Reynolds’ latest book, published by Morning Glory Press Inc., will be in bookstores in August, spokeswoman Carole Blum said.

Now that her second novel has been published, Reynolds said she has another book in mind, this time from a teen-age father’s point of view.

“I’ll need a lot of input from my students,” she said. “They keep me honest.”