Small Town Sinners by Melissa Walker

Small Town Sinners by Melissa Walker 
(Bloomsbury, 2011)


Summary from publisher:
Sometimes you just know everything is about to change.  That you'll finally get your own moment in the spotlight.  This is that year for perennial good girl Lacey Anne Byer.
With her driver's license n hand, Lacey has a little freedom from her protective parents now -- or at least more than she had before.  And as a junior, she is eligible to try out for a starring role in Hell House, her church's annual haunted house of sin.  But it turns out Lacey doesn't need to play a role to have her moment.  What she needs it Ty Davis.  He's smart, cute, and best of all, new.  He doesn't know sweet, shy, good girl Lacey Anne.  With Ty, Lacey could reinvent herself and maybe get her first boyfriend.
As her feelings for Ty grow, and conflicts surrounding Hell House intensify, Lacey finds reason to test her own boundaries -- to question faith she's always known to be absolute.

I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about this book after reading the cover blurb.  Anyone who knows me knows I'm not big on organizes religion, and I have fairly strong views on some of the issues addressed in this book.  I am however, also curious about people who are members of fundamentalist religious groups, whether Christian, Jewish, Morman, or any other denomination.  I thought perhaps that this book would give me a glimpse of what it's like to be a teen in one of these groups.

I really enjoyed this story, even though at times I wanted to shake the parents for being so close-minded about their daughter and her questions.  I could understand why Lacey was beginning to ask hard questions about her faith and her parents' way of life; many teens go through this as they begin to think for themselves about the big-question items in their lives.  Really, Lacey could have gone much farther with her questioning than she did; she really didn't stray all that far off the path that her parents had set her on as a child.  I thought this, too, was a realistic portrayal of a teen.  Not all teens rebel in a hell-bent-for-leather way.  Some rebel quietly and in small ways.

Lacey's character felt real to me, as did the characters of her friends.  This is a quiet story of finding oneself and one's place in the world.  Girls who enjoy will realistic fiction will find much to like between the pages, including a bit of romance.