Brie’s life changes the instant she gets the phone call from her father to hurry to the emergency room. Brie’s at a party and is completely clueless as to what awaits her just a few miles away.
Her sister died.
The circumstances were suspicious, too.
Now Brie is on the path to figuring out what really caused her sister’s death. Did she take her own life in a fit of passion or were some of Brie’s new and mysterious friends the cause of her death?
Losing Faith was a quick paced read that blended everything there is to love about a contemporary novel with an element of mystery. This is the kind of book that, as a lover of contemporary, I would hand to those who aren’t as jazzed about the genre; the mystery is the heart and the pulse of the story without making this book a mystery novel.
Brie is one of the more interesting characters I’ve read lately. She had a strong enough voice to lead me to care about her story and her determination to find the cause of Faith’s death. To me, her voice felt authentically high school and her experiences rang true as well. One minute, she’s deeply in love with a guy and ready to lose her virginity with him, and a couple of days later, he has sort of fallen out of her line of sight. The same thing happens with her “best friend.”
A key element of this story is the idea of a religious cult: Faith had been a deeply devoted follower of god, and she had been heavily involved in her church. What didn’t really work for me as a reader, though, was how this wasn’t played up all that much until the end of the story. I wanted more of this element, ala Hush, and I wanted to know a little bit more about Brie’s new friends, Tessa and Alis. The two of them were very shadowed while they were in the book, and both of them had a vault of knowledge associated with this cult. Tessa had a bit of a wickedly criminal mind I would have loved to get to know better.
That said, I thought that the unraveling of Faith’s death was compelling and twisted enough to keep me reading and to leave me feeling satisfied at the end of the book. I thought Jaden walked a fine line with her messages of faith and following beliefs and I think she did some masterfully. The conclusion came together quite nicely and didn’t try to push any message on the reader.
The grief in this book can, at times, be a bit overwhelming for readers; Jaden tempers this quite a bit through her development of Brie and Faith’s mother. Following Faith’s death, mom became withdrawn, distraught, and completely beside herself in life. Rather than let her flounder as a character, she continues to emerge, and at the end, Brie does something to really bring her mother back to life. What she does happens to be precisely what it was that made her fall into her depression in the first place. It was — and I gag at typing the word, trust me — heartwarming. Losing Faith is a story with a strong family structure, and I think that the depiction of a family that fluctuates with its highs and lows does readers a service in a book world full of dysfunctional families (ah but don’t worry, there is a dysfunctional family here, too, it’s just not central).
Hand this off to fans of Sarah Dessen for the relationship aspects, particularly when it comes to families. Those who loved Holly Cupala’s Tell Me a Secret will want to run to this title, as there are many parallels in the story lines (and enough diversions to never feel like the same story). Fans of contemporary fiction will eat this title up, and the mystery will be a bonus.