Shannon’s Reviews > The Miseducation of Cameron Post > Status Update

I'm setting this one aside and blaming Lucy for picking it :p
She wanted a summer book and so I let her pick a realistic coming-of-age coming-out story ... definitely not something that can hold my attention right now! I need dragons, fairies, vampires, werewolves ... fantasy! It's not a bad book but I don't see myself finishing it any time soon.

This book pretty much has everything in it that could get it banned. Wonder how many schools/libraries/organizations have called for it to be banned already ...

"Just wait, dude," Jamie had said. "I'm serious. It's fucking hard-core." Since Jamie described everything from zombie movies to his parents' fights to the new enchilada platter at Taco John's as "fucking hard-core," none of us could gauge much by it.

Being a true believer meant helping others, lots of others, to believe just like me. To be an agent of God for evangelizing the world. Rather than convincing me of the righteousness of this kind of believing, rather than making me certain of its correctness, it made me question, and doubt, all the more. I knew it wasn't how my parents had thought about the world, about God.

My mother had been a big proponent of live Christmas trees. [...] My mother had also been a big proponent of winter ice-cream cones.
"Well, we don't have to worry about these melting," she used to say, holding a cone in her elegant, leather-gloved hand, her breath visible in the air even as she took a bite.

I don't know why, but this passage really made me sad.

I didn't feel close to God at the Presbyterian church, but some Sundays I felt really close to my memories of being at church, at this place, with my parents. And I liked that feeling.

I didn't want to have those thoughts running simultaneously and constantly, constantly. What I wanted to do was to hide from all of it, to be small and unseen and just to get along. It might have comforted Ruth to talk to God, but it made me feel like I couldn't breathe, like drowning, the diving wells again.

But I also thought, at the exact same time I was thinking the other stuff, that maybe what all this meant was that there was no God, but instead only fate and the chain of events that is, for each of us, predetermined—and that maybe there was some lesson in my mom drowning at Quake Lake thirty years later.

But I didn't have any of that faith, and I didn't know where to get it, how to get it, or even if I wanted it right then. I felt like it could be that God had made this happen, had killed my parents, because I was living my life so wrong that I had to be punished, that I had to be made to understand how I must change, and that Ruth was right, that I had to change through God.

It wasn't like I'd never prayed before [...] (but) it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony, like I was playing at a relationship with God, just like any little kid playing house or grocery store or anything else, but not like it was real. I knew that this is where the faith part was supposed to come in, and that faith, real faith, that's what was supposed to keep the whole thing from just being make-believe.