Rapture Ready (But First, Prom)

Being a teenager can really stink sometimes. Religion can make it easier, or it can make it even more of a chore. You're at that age where you question everything, like the characters in these books, who come from conservative backgrounds and aren't given much freedom to explore spirituality (or anything else) on their own. Fortunately, adults can only get so far into your head, and these young people make their own choices. 

Anyone who's ever harbored a revenge fantasy about their parents will love The Book of Essie by Megan MacLean Weir. Essie is the youngest child and star of a Duggar-style reality show focused on her televangelist father and steely mother. When her mother finds out Essie's pregnant, a quickie wedding is arranged. While not given any apparent say in the matter, Essie maneuvers to get Roarke, a boy she's observed for years, selected as her groom. She's also contacted Liberty Bell, a journalist with a past in the Christian survivalist movement, for exclusive interviews leading up to the nuptials. What becomes obvious to the reader, and eventually to the more observant characters, is that Essie is playing a long game. Will she get what she's after? Plenty of psychological suspense and juicy characters make this one of my favorite books so far this year.

In The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, the title character is a high school basketball star who just may do what all her peers dream of: get out of her coastal Texas town. However, the book opens as she makes a disastrous showing at the state semifinals and kisses her scholarship dreams goodbye. The discovery of the body of a newborn in a dumpster makes everything worse as the nastiest impulses of the community are dressed up as morality and given free rein to come down especially hard on Mercy and her fellow teenage girls. And then the fits begin. Author Keija Parssinen captures the bonds and rivalries among adolescent girls as well as the feel of small-town Texas in this haunting and disturbing tale.

In Melissa Walker's Small Town Sinners, Lacey is a preacher's kid who has landed a plum role as an abortion seeker at her father's Halloween Hell House. That the previously cast girl was sent away to a home for unwed mothers while the boy in question gets off scot-free rankles a little, but it isn't until a childhood friend, mostly grown up and very cute, comes back to town that she starts to question her religious assumptions. Walker handles her characters and their feelings carefully, never mocking their journey to a more nuanced form of belief.

Religious teen couple Cheryl and Jason are victims of a school shooting that kills Cheryl and vilifies Jason despite his heroics. Years later, Jason is involved with a court reporter, then ghosts her. Left to pick up the pieces is Jason's militantly Christian father, who goes from being a villain to a character more deserving of our compassion. Douglas Coupland handles the alternating voices in Hey Nostradamus! with aplomb, even as he contemplates the nature of evil and the claustrophobic world of the devout. 

Of course, Christianity isn't the only religion to oppress its young people. Naomi Ragen explores the choices of young Hasidic women in The Sisters Weiss. In the 1960s, Rose slowly realizes that marriage at 16 and life secluded in the ultra-Orthodox community is not her path. Forty years later, Rose, now a successful photographer, is contacted by her niece Rivka through her daughter with a message that she too wants to flee the stifling world in which she was raised. Rivka has no idea what Rose's decision to leave the Hasidim cost her, and the two women try to negotiate their history and find a way forward. Ragen is known for her sensitive looks at women in Judaism, and this does not disappoint. 

Have more good books on young people finding their own way? Tell us about them in the comments.