YA New York

Right now I’m sitting in my hotel room in Barcelona — it is ten p.m. here — where I have been reading Peace, Love & Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle. As I began the book, I couldn’t help thinking of a book I read several months ago: Pure by Terra Elan McVoy.

Since I’m only a third of the way through the latest Lauren Myracle, let me tell you about Pure, which was blurbed by Lauren Myracle herself.

I went into it thinking I’d hate it, because the press release from the publicist said it was about a group of girls who all have purity rings — symbols of their promise to Christ that they will stay chaste until they marry.

See, I’m a really liberal kind of gal. My upbringing, however, was not. When I was four years old I had a recurring nightmare that Judgement Day had come, and I had missed it. (In the dreams, I would walk around my house looking for my parents, then go outside and walk up and down my block knocking on doors. No one answered, and I was all alone in the world.)

All that fear of going to hell kind of soured Christianity for me as I got older and realized I should stop trying to “save” my friends if I wanted them to keep being my friends.

So when I saw Pure sitting in my reading pile, I thought, “Should I even bother?”

Yes. Absolutely yes.

It’s easy to forget that there are different kinds of Christianity, and it’s not always about fear. Indeed, I believe the main message is supposed to be one of love.

So, back to the story: One of the girls goes rogue, by which I mean, she is unchaste. By which I mean she has sex. All but one of her four friends stop speaking to her.

Then the book doesn’t go off into a weirdo psychedelic Christian rant about the evils of premarital sex, ending up with the sinner begging God for forgiveness as she goes into labor. No, instead, McVoy put a lot of thought into this. She wrote about looking for passages in the Bible that specifically say premarital sex is wrong (and finding none), about what this promise to remain chaste means, what breaking it means, and about other promises. Promises to friends, implied promises to be faithful and forgiving, and the general gist of trying to emulate Christ.

While McVoy doesn’t write, “Teen sex is great, and everyone should do it,” she does take a stand against judging others. She also sheds light on some of the ways in which Christian girls can be particularly mean to one another, like starting mini holy wars at their schools. Her message is powerful, and deep, and moving.

What I like best about it is that it’s a good read whether you were raised Christian or Hindu, Muslim or Jewish, atheist or agnostic. In fact, it reminds those of us out there who identify as liberal Jewish Buddhist agnostics that we’re doing ourselves a disservice when we mock the wacky evangelicals.

It’s easy to make fun of Krazy Kristians, but it’s also unfair — . Lauren Myracle, whose books are just plain awesome, is a good example of that. So is John Green. And if you’re in the market for Christian fiction … well, you could do much worse than Pure.

PS. Peace, Love & Baby Ducks? Love it so far. Actually, it starts out with the protagonist spending her summer on Lookout Mountain, which straddles Tennessee and Georgia. There’s a pretty strict Christian school, Covenant College, at the top of that mountain, though Lauren doesn’t mention it in her book. Hey, Lauren! You ever hear of Covenant College?