"A Song Called Home" by Sara Zarr

I'm not completely sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it.

It's Christian fiction, but there's nothing on the cover or anything to suggest that. And I was expecting actual serious drama, not drama caused by angst and by both of the main characters having Chronic Bad Decision Syndrone.

 

(Spoilers in the next couple of paragraphs, mild enough that I'm not going to bother tagging them.)

Basically, the entire book is about two girls, Louisa "Lou"/"Lu"/"El"/"Belle" (our protagonist) and Casey (her older sister) struggling to adjust to their mom getting remarried and to figure out what place their new stepdad has in their lives. Which they do, eventually. But not before Casey angsts a lot, Lou angsts to a lesser degree and learns to play the guitar, and various other things happen. Lots of drama, mostly, enough of which falls enough under "school drama" that it merited that post tag.

 

I was fairly happy that the main characters did warm up to their stepdad eventually, and that he was a genuinely nice person. The book wasn't my favorite, but that bit did give me the feels. (I think that's the first time I've ever said "the feels" on this blog.)

 

Of the two characters with Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome (you guessed it, Lu and Casey), Casey had it worse. And it only flared up occasionally in either of them, but it was consistent enough to meet the criteria.  And in fairness, they didn't cause all the problems for themselves. Only about half to two thirds.

(To have Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome, a character must repeatedly cause avoidable problems to happen anyway as a direct consequence of choices they make when they are mentally and situationally capable of making a non-problematic choice.)

 

I would like to give this book the Librarymouse Literary Award for Failing at Christian Fiction. Properties that qualify it for this award include theological quality (not great, there's prosperity gospel in there, but at least they do talk about forgiveness and other such concepts a couple times, and Louisa does pray occasionally), un-Christian behavior by characters (mostly minor ones, but come on, that {T-ish "non-binary" guy} was completely unnecessary) and a general lack of, y'know, presence of faith in the book. What I mean by that last one is that while it does get mentioned a couple times, the characters' Christian faith doesn't really factor into anything in the book. And while that's sadly true of some real people's faith, it's (to put it mildly) suboptimal.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for alcoholism (the two main characters' original dad), angst, and that guy in the content warning above (who would be easy to miss for younger people).

And this book can have 2 stars. I didn't like it much; the characters' Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome and all the angsting, combined with content warning tag guy and various other factors, make a rather unappetizing smoothie.

(Endnote: While reading this, I repeatedly yelled things like "There will be repercussions for that, I can hear them with my metagaming ears" and "Can you just make a good decision for once in your life?" and other such. This may have caused several of my family members to look askance at me when I yelled at a book at odd moments.)