The God Box by Alex Sanchez

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Title: The God Box
Author: Alex Sanchez
Number of Pages: 248 pages
My Rating: 5/5

Paul is a Christian teen who has been dating his best friend Angie since middle school, but while he loves her, he feels no attraction towards her. Every night he prays that God will make him attracted to girls and take away his feelings about guys. Then he meets Manuel, who is a Christian and gay and sees nothing contradictory about that. As Paul and Manuel become closer, he starts to question what he's been taught about the evils of homosexuality.

I won't lie. This book is as subtle as a brick and Manuel is unbelievably wise and perfect for a teenager, but I loved it to death. I don't really consider myself a Christian anymore (and I was never this sort of actively-Christian Christian myself), but this is how I grew up and Sanchez portrays the conservative Christian community perfectly. Reading this felt so familiar to me. The Christians in this book aren't parodies; they're real people, and I loved that the story wasn't about choosing between being a Christian and being gay, but about being a gay Christian.

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: This book is as subtle as a brick and Manuel is unbelievably wise and perfect for a teenager, but I loved it to death. ::

Hee!

Every time I see a review pop up, I worry that everyone but me is gonna be all, "subtle as a brick! how could anyone say they loved this??" (Yes, I worry about weird things.)

Yes, it's as subtle as a brick overall, and yet I also feel like he's got a bunch of stuff subtly right that many authors don't get right. I mostly notice that on the queer stuff (f'rex, why one comes out, as well as the hard-to-predict and non-cliched responses people have to that), but I'm happy to hear that he's getting the Christian stuff similarly right from an insiders' point of view. I know that one of the things that I loved about the book was that Sanchez's Christian characters were accurate reflections of actual Christians I have known and struggled with (people! not straw men!), but if the characters don't ping true for people who are, or have been, inside Christian circles, then the book fails at what it sets out to do.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I wibbled with my score. Should I take off a point or half a point for being such a typically unsubtle YA problem novel and for the impossibility of Manuel? But I can't. It is totally a five star book for me.

But yeah, it was good in a lot of ways. Aside from Manuel and Abuelita, who were a little to saintly and perfect, the characterisations were really believable (especially Paul, which is good since he's the main character!), and even Manuel and Abuelita I loved despite raising my eyebrow to them on more than one occasion. And I really liked that Angie was Paul's best friend first and stayed his best friend after they broke up. She wasn't some cardboard girlfriend. She was a real person.