Jesus Fish
Born Again
By Kelly Kerney

Kelly Kerney is a young writer who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household, and her first novel is about a young girl who learns to see through her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Kerney makes a point in her introduction of saying that the novel is not meant to be a reflection of her own experience, but still you've got to wonder about it. I also wonder what she'll do for a second novel.

"Born Again" tells the story of Melanie, a 14-year-old member of a Pentacostal church. She's a master at Bible quizzes and a true believer. As the story begins, she's taking a chastity vow and her father is so proud of her he's showing her off to people at an ice cream parlor. But slowly, Kerney starts to reveal more unsettling information about her character's family situation, and slowly Melanie starts seeing things differently herself.

"Born Again" has some nicely crafted passages and shows a writerly sense of structure. As Melanie reads Darwin and finds that he's not the Satanist she expected, events in her life seem to parallel the subjects she's reading about.

At its heart, "Born Again" is no more complicated a story than that of a fundamentalist Christian who begins to understand that there is more to the world than what her church is telling her. But Kerney introduces a lot of other complications to Melanie's family (mental illness, shady pasts, single motherhood, domestic violence) that don't really need to be there. Any one of them alone is believable, but all together they're a bit much.

Still, "Born Again" is a good read. It's not often that I read something by a liberal author that has its sense of compassion toward fundamentalist Christians even as it skewers them. I appreciate that.