Growing up in the 1950s, Ben is an unusual boy who can't stand pretense or empty practices, especially when it comes to Christianity. He, along with his relationship with his best friend Jonathan, impacts his community in a remarkable way in Saint Ben by author John Fischer.

Admittedly, I had the wrong impression about this ChristFic book before I started it. I thought it sounded like a story about an innocent boy who's so passionate about God that his passion makes the hypocritical grown-up Christians around him see the error of their ways.

But Ben isn't an innocent boy on a mission for God. Ben's friendship with Jonathan, the narrator of this story, isn't a carefree schoolboy friendship. The key grownups in the story aren't one-dimensional pictures of piety. And this isn't a sweet or simplistic little tale with a nice and neat ending.

Sure, it has a nostalgic feel to it, with its '50s setting (still considered contemporary fiction at the time the novel was written) and distinct threads of U.S. history and Americana woven through it. And much of it plainly depicts two boys experiencing the time right before adolescence as they play, wonder, get into humorous mischief, and that kind of stuff.

Yet, though it's simply told, it's a complex story. The kind that's supposed to make you think and feel and think some more. A story that doesn't hand out a bunch of easy answers to the problems it depicts and the questions it raises.

Now, one partly "resolved" matter in the story didn't settle with me, as it addressed the issue of sexual abuse in the church. I understand how the issue would more or less be "over" for the two main characters after a certain point, since neither one of them have been abused. But that kind of problem isn't resolved just because someone may have gotten the offender to stop it. Merely putting a stop to abusive behavior doesn't heal the victims, sweeping the issue under the rug doesn't fix a church or the people in it, and an offender who manages to remain in position is likely to reoffend in the future.

This novel doesn't go further into all of that though, since then it wouldn't be Ben and Jonathan's story. Still, the manipulation, secrecy, and blindness/denial the story touches on there is haunting because it's too common in real life. In too many real churches.

On another note, although the events involving Ben and Jonathan in the novel's last quarter didn't surprise me, my particular sensibilities made a certain aspect of the ending a bizarre, highly disturbing one for me. Creepy as all get-out, and not in a fun way.

Yet, the disturbing, sobering, abundantly meaningful, unusual ending of this book fits the unusual boy who drives the plot...like a motorist in an unusual American automobile.

I can't describe all the ways this story touched me, but I'm unlikely to ever forget it. Once I'm mentally prepared to read the sequel, I will. ( )

I cried SO HARD at the end of this book. It really touched me. The sequel was not nearly as good though. :( ( )