Godless

Pete Hautman

A wonderful idea of a young adult book resides in these pages-- what would happen if a couple of teenagers started their own religion? And they do. Jason Block (never explicitly shown as a school outcast but implied as one throughout) has had it with religion, bullies, and pretty much everything. While he and his friend Shin are out collecting snails for Shin's gastropodarium, Henry, the local bully, comes along and punches Jason out (for no reasno we're ever given, but Jason isn't the world's most reliable narrator). While lying on the ground seeing stars under the town's water tower, Jason forms the idea of a religion that worships the water tower-- Chutengodianism. Shin comes along for the ride, and the two of them begin, slowly, to gather converts. Needless to say, that's when everything starts to go wrong.

Godless is by no means a perfect book (towards the end, astute readers of an advanced enough age will start seeing extreme similarities to Rona Jaffe's *Mazes and Monsters*, not a bad thing, but does carry a slight odor of copout), but it's certainly a fun one. Raises a good number of questions that are well worth raising at the reading level where one would be picking this book up (*Booklist* pegs it for the 7th-10th grade crowd, but adults will get a kick out of it as well). Won a National Book Award this year. I'll leave you to decide whether it deserved one, but it's certainly a good read.