Story of an Evangelical Girlhood
By
CARLENE BAUER
SMALL TOWN SINNERS
By Melissa Walker
276 pp. Bloomsbury. $16.99. (Young adult; ages 14
and up)
Lacey
Anne Byer, the heroine of Melissa Walker’s “Small Town Sinners,” is a born good
girl: the 16-year-old daughter of the children’s pastor at the House of
Enlightenment, an evangelical church in a working- and middle-class enclave in
the South — something like Dillon, Tex., in “Friday Night Lights.” Lacey even
has a Tyra-like spitfire, a girl named Starla Joy, and a lovable Landry-like
geek, Dean, for best friends.
Lacey is
good girl enough to wear a True Love Waits ring, but wise enough (or perhaps
just inexperienced enough) to see its pointlessness. “I don’t need a ring to
remind me to stay pure — I haven’t even kissed a guy, let alone gotten close to
anything beyond that,” she says.
But not
for long. Perhaps inevitably for a young adult novel, “Small Town Sinners”
follows sweet and innocent Lacey as her faith is tested and her ideas of purity
are challenged (and, of course, as she finally gets kissed).
The
action, both real and spiritual, centers on Hell Houses, the haunted houses run
by evangelical Christian churches and parachurch organizations typically during
the weeks leading up to Halloween. Hell Houses are meant to scare visitors into
repentance with melodramatic, graphic depictions of sin. Lacey aspires to be
“Abortion Girl” in the House of Enlightenment’s version, which shows the
consequences of a grisly abortion and the costs of gay marriage.
This sets
her apart from Ty, the object of her affections and a boy who inconveniently
questions what they’ve both been taught by their church and families. “You at
least have to admit that the morality of gay marriage is open to
interpretation,” he says at one point, asking Lacey to enlarge her conception
of sin. “Unlike, say, the morality of child abuse. Can you imagine some states
legalizing that?”
But it’s
not just teenage romance and heated conversations with her new boyfriend that
put Lacey’s faith to the test. As her friend Dean, more sci-fi nerd than
football hero, is bullied by his classmates, and Starla Joy’s older sister,
Tessa, becomes unexpectedly pregnant despite pledging that True Love Waits,
Lacey finds herself increasingly at odds with her parents, especially her father,
until then the unquestioned head of the family.
When
Lacey’s father fears that she has made the wrong kinds of friends in Ty and
Starla Joy, she questions whether her father, who blames teenage pregnancy
squarely on girls while absolving boys, is as warm and forgiving as she
believed him to be. “I can’t believe my father — my rational, patient, kind,
devout father — is saying this,” Lacey fumes in the wake of one particularly
unpleasant impasse. “And I can’t believe it’s true. I won’t believe it.”
Walker
has written a credible and tender evocation of the moment when a young person’s
beliefs begin to emerge and potentially diverge from the teachings of a
family’s religion. Lacey’s blind faith may not be entirely understandable to
those who have never believed as she does. But for teenagers raised in more
evangelical homes, as I was, the character’s spiritual life will ring
absolutely true.
While the
religious components of Walker’s novel are scrupulously rendered, the romantic
story isn’t entirely believable. Walker, who has been an editor at ElleGirl and
Seventeen magazines, has previously written Y.A. romance-centric novels, but Ty
feels more like an import from the Department of Wish Fulfillment than a real
character in the scope of this story. This makes “Small Town Sinners” read
somewhat more like a standard teenage romance than the quietly astute story
about religious growing pains it otherwise is. After all, when a blue-eyed,
blond-haired boy with the magical ability to apprehend a girl’s latent outer
and inner beauty asks her in all sincerity to stop quoting Scripture and use
her own voice instead, it makes having potentially heretical thoughts about God
a whole lot easier. Most girls in Lacey’s position are probably not so lucky.
But for
the most part, by stressing the importance of forgiveness and honesty, Walker
proves that her heart is in the right place, and readers will sense this. Near
the end, Lacey contemplates a verse from the prophet Isaiah: “Come now and let
us reason together.” It’s a good summation of what Walker asks of her
characters and, by extension, of her readers.
Carlene Bauer is the author
of a memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.”
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