21 April 2006 BLIND FAITH by Ellen Wittlinger, Simon and Schuster, July 2006, ISBN: 1-4169-0273-2

"Believe in me

Help me believe in anything

Cause I want to be someone who believes."

--Counting Crows, "Mister Jones"

"Why did people get so crazy about what other people believed? Entire countries fought wars over it. That seemed to be what most wars were fought over--that somebody had different beliefs than you had. It was insane. Couldn't we all just believe what we wanted without forcing everybody else to think the same way? Yelling at people, or shooting at them, didn't usually convince them to believe you, anyway."

A war breaks out in the home of teenager Liz Scattergood when, in the wake of her maternal grandmother's death, her mother becomes deeply involved with a spiritualist church whose members believe in communicating with the dead. Due to events in his childhood, Liz's father has no use for organized religion, not even the more mainstream varieties. Liz, whose curiosity leads her to accompany her mother to the unusual church by the creek, fears she'll be forced to choose one side of the battle or the other.

"Once we got outside, I took a deep breath and tried to unscramble my mind. I could hear the whistling creek, the thin place, burbling over the rocks. Was it really magical? How could I believe what I'd just been told? But how could I not believe it? It would be wonderful to believe it!

"If only there were some way to prove it, to make sure the ministers weren't making the whole thing up. Of course, if you could prove it, it probably wouldn't be a religion. Religions were all about things you couldn't prove. If you could just chat with your dead relatives whenever you wanted to, people wouldn't get so hyped up about it."

Meanwhile, Liz becomes seriously interested in a boy for the first time when her mom's friend Lily returns to town after a twenty year absence. Lily, who is dying of leukemia, and who has been estranged all that time from her own mother (the neighbor Liz has nicknamed "Crabby"), has a son Liz's age (Nathan) and a younger daughter. Lily will need her children's newly acquainted grandmother to raise them when she is gone. Nathan is struggling with the imminent death of his mother and his difficult life with Grandma/Crabby. As a result of getting to know and trying to comfort him, Liz begins to learn the language of relationships.

It is this developing relationship between Liz and Nathan that is the beating heart of BLIND FAITH. As with John and Marisol from the author's acclaimed Printz Honor book, HARD LOVE, and Kenyon and Razzle from another of my favorites, RAZZLE, Ellen Wittlinger does a brilliant job here of developing the teen characters as well as probing the interpersonal complications.

"In a minute or two we were kissing, very softly and uncertainly, as if kissing were something new we'd just invented. Even though I'd never kissed a boy before, it wasn't scary like I always thought it would be. Of course, I never imagined my first kiss would be with a boy whose mother lay dying across the street. It was a very strange thing; I felt remarkably happy, and at the same time terribly sad, as if the kiss had infected me with Nathan's sorrow. Or maybe, I thought, some of his pain had transferred to me, and now he wouldn't have to carry all of it by himself."

You'd better believe that BLIND FAITH is one of the YA highlights of 2006.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com