Talk about mixed feelings—and mixed messages. Seventeen year old Joshua Wynn, the narrator of Saving Maddie, is a PK (preacher’s kid). He sings in the church choir, visits old folks in the nursing home, and presides over the church youth group. But he doesn’t really know what he believes or why he believes it. He knows the he shouldn’t use foul language, and he doesn’t, but why not? Joshua couldn’t tell you. He knows he should go to church and obey his parents. But he can’t say anything to support those beliefs, except quote you a Bible verse. He knows that premarital sex is wrong, but why? Joshua hasn’t a clue.

It’s not surprising, then, that when Joshua sets out to help his old friend Maddie “see the light” and come back to the faith, Joshua is the one who is most influenced and changed and pulled away from the shell of a moral code that he had at the beginning of the story. Joshua says at several points in the story that he thinks he can save Maddie. So his first mistake is that he thinks he is capable of “saving” someone; salvation in the Christian sense of the word is strictly God’s province. I don’t recall Joshua praying at all in the course of the story, although bad girl Maddie does pray before meals and say that she’s “spiritual but not religious.” Joshua is obviously a mixed up Pharisee with no moral core to his churchiness and no real relationship with Jesus Christ. He’s a good kid with no real reason to stay good. He and Maddie need authentic Christianity modeled for them, Christ made flesh in the lives of Christians, but all they get are platitudes, goodness for the sake of appearances, judgment, and confusing theology from their parents and other adults in their lives. And of course, all the kids they know are either “doing it” or at the very least see no reason why any sane person would remain sexually abstinent until marriage. So nowhere in the entire book does anyone give any coherent rationale for sexual purity.

That said, Joshua is a pretty good example of what our churches and Christian homes are turning out. I’m not sure my own teenagers could give a reasoned Biblical argument for sexual purity or articulate their own Christian beliefs in a way that would make sense to others with differing beliefs. (I’m not talking about converting others, but rather just knowing what you believe.) Sadly enough, I’m finding that you can lead a horse to water . . . Perhaps author Varian Johnson made his protagonist, Joshua, so clueless and ignorant because he saw that many if not most Christian young people from strong, faith-filled homes are in the same place as Joshua. If anyone is talking to them about not only what the Bible teaches but also why they should obey its strictures, they’re not buying. And many, many who have professed faith in Christ have never come to an intimate relationship with Jesus that makes them eager to please him and reluctant to disobey His words in Scripture. That relationship and faith walk are the only things that are sufficient to enable a young person (or an old person) to resist sexual temptation or any other kind of temptation.

So Saving Maddie is a picture of how the world is, without any pointers to how it could be or why it should be better. Maddie is a tragic figure who does need saving. So is Joshua. But by the end of the book they’re both still drowning. One could call this story of teenage confusion authentic, or perhaps it’s just sad.

Sidenote: I don’t want to start another cover controversy, but I really couldn’t figure out whether the characters in this novel were black or or not. Mr. Johnson is black. Certain things—the pastor’s name, the name of Joshua’s church, other minor details—led me to believe that the characters in the book were black. And Joshua mentioned Maddie’s “brown skin” at least a couple of times in the book. However, the girl on the cover of the book doesn’t look black or brown to me; she looks like a white model with some shadow on her skin. However, I found this interview where author Varian Johnson discusses this very issue, and as he says, I don’t suppose it really matters what skin color the characters have.