One evening last fall, I stopped by Joseph-Beth Booksellers
to pick up a couple of novels. As I headed past the event area to fetch them, an
author who was doing a reading for about ten people looked up, met my eye, and
stopped reading. “Join us,” she invited in a friendly voice. So a few minutes
later, after I’d found the books I came for, I caught the Q&A part of her
presentation. The author was Sara Zarr, who
was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award for Story of a Girl.
(I interrupt the story here to note that even nationally recognized authors do signings with fewer than a dozen people. Book signings can be just depressing. I once got to have a nice chat with Heloise about stubborn fabric stains because there was nobody, and I mean nobody, in line to hear about her hints.)
Anyway, I sat down in the audience at first because I felt sorry for the author. I stayed, and eventually bought the book, because I was captivated by what she had to say. One of the reasons she had me at hello was that Once Was Lost, the book she was there to promote, is a teen novel about faith and doubt. Zarr said that in her own experience as a teenager, and among teens she had observed, adolescence was a time of questioning everything. And we’re surrounded by stories of how those questions play out in various arenas for adolescents—at school, in family relationships, in dating. But why, when lots of actual teens experience a crisis of faith in adolescence, were there no YA novels about religious doubt?
Once Was Lost is a beautifully told story about Samara (Sam), a fifteen-year-old girl with a lot on her shoulders. Her mom is in rehab for an alcohol problem that the family has managed to keep largely hidden from the world, and her dad is handling the stress by being married to his job as a pastor. He has more time for the congregation than for his own daughter. And there are serious problems in the congregation too, as a thirteen-year-old member suddenly goes missing on a Sunday afternoon.
During the two weeks that follow, as the town halts its normal life to hunt for Jody Shaw, Sam comes face to face with the inadequacies of her childhood faith. She yearns to believe, but can’t ignore the stark reality of “all the suffering, all the brokenness, and no one to fix it.” It’s an honest, and ultimately hopeful, book that I’d recommend to any teen or adult who has ever wondered where God could be in a hurting world. When grace appears unexpectedly at the end of the book, there’s nothing cheap or manufactured about it. Zarr manages to walk that fine line between providing blessed assurance and recognizing that for some of us, doubt never really disappears, but becomes woven into the fabric we call faith.
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