Book Review: Pure

Synopsis

Fifteen-year-old Tabitha and her four best friends all wear purity rings to symbolize their pledge to remain virgins until they marry, but when one admits that she has broken the pledge each girl must reexamine her faith, friendships, and what it means to be pure.

Comments

 This is a complicated novel-full of the intense feelings of adolescent friendship and romantic relationships.  Tabitha finds herself asking what she really believes in, what’s really right.  It shows the concrete black and white that teens customarily see the world and how they negotiate through that.

Language

Level 1, 2 [?]

Sexual Content

Teens kiss. An adult tells a story from when he was a teen, about how he began to almost hate ‘the girls he’d be with, how easily they gave up their bodies to him…”  A teen couple has sex.

Drugs/Alcohol

A grownup chaperon smokes. An adult uses chewing tobacco.

Violence/Disturbing

None

Social/Family

A teen won’t attend a Christian gathering because some of the churches support homosexuals. A kid who is gay has ’saviour angels’ who are ‘determined to love him despite his ‘refusal to See the Light (i.e., Convert to the Straight Side). 

Religion/Spiritual

The novel is set in a framework of Judeo-Christian values and has references to beliefs, activities, Bible stories and verses in accordance with that framework.  A teen, who is Christian, has parents,  who are not Christian, who worry about the influence ‘Jesus Freakiness’ will have on her.