Nominated for 2011 Cybil Awards, Young Adult Fiction category. Nominated by Maria Ciccone at The Serpentine Library.

This short YA novel, 162 pages, is a debut by Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter. Unfortunately, it’s way too post-modern, pagan, new-agey for me.

One of the teen characters says that her family back home is “super Christian–Jesus is the only way.” Then the girl, Tangerine, who is obviously from one of Those Families (she has six brothers), asks Luke, the protagonist of the novel, “That can’t be true, can it?”

“No, I don’t trust anybody who says there’s only one way,” answers Luke.

The book goes on to preach, via characters who are confused but honest (of course), that you make your own way, create your own reality. If you believe it, it’s true for you. Tangerine believes in God-in-Nature. Some of the other characters in the novel are recovering alcoholics, and they believe in “a Higher Power, whatever you conceive Him to be.” Another character with another odd name, Cinnamon, believes in shamans and in her own animal tattoos. Another, Jim, believes in kachina dolls that he carves out of wood. Luke is the unbeliever who just can’t wrap his head around any of this mystical nonsense until . . .

The setting is the best part of the novel, near Moab, Utah. Ms. Roy describes the landscape and its effect of the lives of the characters in vivid prose that made me ready for a road trip to the Southwest. “Mountains of sandstone overwhelmed them.” “The sun’s angle on the earth had deepened the color of the rocks to a dark watermelon.” “They watched the lightning rip through the sky and the rain pelt down on the barren earth, making puddles, splashing, changing to darker and darker shades of red, brown, gold.”

As for the New Age themes, same old, same old. And I’m stuck in that Jesus-is-the-only-way rut (thank God), so I couldn’t possibly understand. Actually, I understand, but I’m not buying. If I have to create my own reality, my own god, my own idol, then I am lost. What could I possibly create that is worthy of worship or powerful enough to dispense the grace and forgiveness I need to live and breathe and avoid despair?

In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:5-11)

I just don’t think kachina dolls or bear tats or even some vague Higher Power are going to cut it.