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emmashutup 's review for:
Have a Little Faith in Me
by Sonia Hartl
emotional
hopeful
lighthearted
fast-paced
There are certain truths I've come to realize as I age, and one of them is that I rarely enjoy YA anymore.
This may not be surprising; I'm 25 and my reviews skew critical in almost any genre. But especially in these wild pandemic-economy-crumbling-war-brewing times, I'm finding myself reaching for books that make me feel like a kid again only to be disappointed because I know I'm not one.
But this book, in many ways, is what my younger self was looking for and never found. It takes place at an out-of-touch evangelical summer camp, but it does what few books of this kind do: shows characters who learn to recognize the way authority figures weaponize their faith without actually giving their faith up. That's huge! If you're a young person who practices any religion, you don't often get honest stories about faith that aren't, well, laughably bad or sexist and homophobic or both.
That being said, the execution kind of lost me. There are some funny lines, but most of the dialogue was stilted, like it was trying to check after-school-special boxes (have we talked about consent yet? How about acknowledging the protagonist's cishet privilege?). Nothing wrong with including these things, of course, but here it felt very unnatural. Most of the characters are pretty one-note as well; I like the female friendship aspect, but I'd like it more if those characters had a little bit more depth. And I was hoping for more with the Christianity angle; the ending kind of forgets about it, unfortunately.
But, like I said, I'm so decrepit that I was actually alive when Harry Potter came out, so what do I know.
This may not be surprising; I'm 25 and my reviews skew critical in almost any genre. But especially in these wild pandemic-economy-crumbling-war-brewing times, I'm finding myself reaching for books that make me feel like a kid again only to be disappointed because I know I'm not one.
But this book, in many ways, is what my younger self was looking for and never found. It takes place at an out-of-touch evangelical summer camp, but it does what few books of this kind do: shows characters who learn to recognize the way authority figures weaponize their faith without actually giving their faith up. That's huge! If you're a young person who practices any religion, you don't often get honest stories about faith that aren't, well, laughably bad or sexist and homophobic or both.
That being said, the execution kind of lost me. There are some funny lines, but most of the dialogue was stilted, like it was trying to check after-school-special boxes (have we talked about consent yet? How about acknowledging the protagonist's cishet privilege?). Nothing wrong with including these things, of course, but here it felt very unnatural. Most of the characters are pretty one-note as well; I like the female friendship aspect, but I'd like it more if those characters had a little bit more depth. And I was hoping for more with the Christianity angle; the ending kind of forgets about it, unfortunately.
But, like I said, I'm so decrepit that I was actually alive when Harry Potter came out, so what do I know.