“I’m 14 years old and my life is over. I look out the window at my friends, laughing and bugging out on the street, and there’s this huge, empty hole hanging between me and them … being pretty just brings trouble, I found that out fast.”

Teen pregnancy forces young girls to become women with children before they’ve had a chance to be children themselves. In “Bad Angel,” a book by Helen Benedict, the character Bianca Diaz, a 14-year-old Dominican-American teenage mother, finds herself caught in a trap between doing what’s best for herself and doing what’s best for her baby daughter.

The setting is a New York City rough, inner-city neighborhood gangbangers, drug deals, knives and bullets just around the corner from the tiny one-bedroom apartment Bianca and her baby share with Bianca’s mother.

Anyone who has been a teenage girl or has raised one can definitely relate to the main character. Bianca is smart and sassy. She’s only 14, but she thinks she knows everything. She uses that sassiness to protect the little girl inside her who just wants to finish high school, go to college and make something of her life. But she feels her baby is the wedge between her and her dreams.

Teresa, Bianca’s mother, desperately searches for answers to their troubles, going to great lengths for a better life for both her daughter and granddaughter. There’s also Roberto, the love-struck 18-year-old who feels the need to protect Bianca from the evils of the world.

As the story evolves, so do the characters, keeping the reader in anticipation of what they will do next.

“I enjoyed discovering (Bianca) and watching her grow,” author Benedict said. “And in the end, she’s very heroic.”

Benedict encompasses many issues in her most recent novel: poverty, racism, single parenthood and adoption. But it’s her ability to turn teen pregnancy, an issue many Americans curse and turn their noses up at, into an issue of compassion that touches the reader most.

“Being a teenager and being a mother are fundamentally opposite,” Benedict said. “A teenager is about being self-obsessed exploring oneself and being a parent is about learning to put oneself last. So, there’s an inherent conflict for teenage mothers.”

One of Benedict’s inspirations for “Bad Angel” came from living on a Dominican-Republican street in New York. During the four years she lived there, she saw many young girls struggle through situations similar to Bianca’s.

Using her writing as her message, Benedict said, “I would like to counteract stereotyping and help people see a figure like a Dominican teenage mother as a fully fleshed human being like someone they know.”

In addition to creating rich characters who provoke thought in her stories’ readers, Benedict enjoys creative writing because it allows her to become people who are different from herself.

“It’s like being able to fly,” she said. “It’s exciting to be able to become other people to enter others’ lives.”

The 44-year-old author and journalism professor at Columbia University is working on her third novel, a sequel to her first, “A World Like This.”

“Bad Angel,” by Helen Benedict. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1996, 293 pages, $22.95 hardcover, $12.95 paper.