Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

It's been two years since her mother died, and sixteen-year-old Riley Rose is doing her best to cultivate a bad-girl image that probably would have made her mother a little proud. Her dad, on the other hand, has gone back to his hometown with Riley in tow, rediscovered church, and taken up with the very nice Norma. After one [End Page 201] too many transgressions, Riley finds herself shipped off to church camp (Norma's idea, of course) five hours from home in the middle of the Australian desert. Once there, she decides she might as well be the one to bring the drama, and she certainly succeeds in shaking up the regulars with her fat-girl wit, cavalier unbelief, and crusading desire to liberate various underdogs from their oppression by Christian bullies. One regular, though, gets under her skin: Dylan, former youth leader and bully, now paraplegic enigma, spells trouble, redemption, and deep like for Riley. Riley's sarcasm crackles throughout her passage from bad girl to girl in love, and her voice stays sharp and snappy even in moments when her defensive armor is pierced. She grows in hope and charity, but there's never a schmaltzy, epiphanic about-face. Indeed, her final statement of something-almost-like-faith is Thomas More's prayer for the Maybes—a keen example of how smartly conceived this character is. Other characters may be props for Riley's drama, but they're awfully smart ones as well, with just enough piety to send up, and enough devilry to scan as authentic; these Christian campers are every bit as horny as their band-geek counterparts, for instance, and just as caught up in social games. Riley brings the right combination of honesty and audacity to free them from their pretensions and get a little closer to real.