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PURE. By Terra McVoy. 332 pp. Simon Pulse.
Tabitha McAbe's mind and heart are running in several directions all at once. She's worried that she and her friends' commitment to abstinence has been compromised. She's worried that she'll lose her best friend. She's worried that Jake, a new boy in her life, might not like her. She's worried her secular parents don't get her blossoming Christian faith.
Oh, and she's worried about her yearbook deadline.
Welcome back to high school, an experience that never seems so dramatic in hindsight but always feels like life-and-death when you're going through it. And in "Pure," debut novelist and Atlanta resident Terra Elan McVoy examines life as a teen who's grappling with growth on almost too many levels: spirituality, interpersonal relationships and, yes, sexuality.
"It's a hard time," McVoy notes. "You start to figure out your own morality, and you can lose friends over it."
"Pure" opens with a friend from Tabitha's purity-ring-wearing circle having broken her promise. This lapse sets off a domino effect that finds Tabitha questioning almost everything: her friends, faith and parents. A potential new boyfriend only complicates matters further.
McVoy, a bookstore manager by day, found inspiration for the book in her own experiences as a young Christian who often had to defend her faith with her more secular peers. (Terra McVoy writing about Tabitha McAbe would be the first clue.)
"I had a friend in grad school who could not let go of the notion that my faith was a social construct," says McVoy, who earned a master's degree in creative writing at Florida State University. "And I was like, 'Can we drop it? You're not gonna make me stop believing in Jesus by showing me how stupid I am.' When you're talking to people who don't believe or, worse, believe that your belief is ridiculous, that's a lot harder to take."
"Pure" takes young readers through the daunting early years of high school, where hormones, alliances, obligations and relationships all start to run into one another.
It's also written in McVoy's own ebullient style.
I met McVoy nearly 15 years ago on the staff of a weekly entertainment publication in Tallahassee, Fla. Then, as now, she often spoke like a giddy teen, her voice and emotions rising and falling over assignments. But she attacked her projects with the zeal of a seasoned gonzo journalist — even on assignments as silly as living life as a blonde.
So it was not a surprise to see "Pure" written from the perspective of the equally effusive Tabitha. It's as much a teen journal as a novel, awash in italics, labored punctuation marks and run-on sentences — whether Tabitha's talking about what to wear for a date or raising a biblical allegory. While McVoy used former co-workers at her bookstore for research into life in high school, her voice is very much her own.
After listening to a sermon from her pastor about God's commitment to us, Tabitha becomes swept up in the moment. "A sudden rush of relief comes through me then so fast I start to tear up," Tabitha scribbles. "No matter what we've done, God is running. Even if we squander everything He gives us, even if we break promises and make fools of ourselves and end up drunk in a pigsty, like the father of the prodigal son story — God is running. All we have to do is head in His direction."
Considering the sexuality at play here, it could be more salacious. But McVoy said she wanted to avoid the steaminess that has crept into young-adult fiction and TV shows like "Gossip Girl."
So a parent needn't worry about her middle-school child being led astray by "Pure," McVoy says.
"Girls are so pushed toward knowing about and talking about and thinking about sex and their bodies," she notes. "You can blame Bratz dolls, you can blame celebrities, you can blame whatever. But they're forced so much at a young age to be body conscious and sexually aware and to have sex appeal.
"I can show this book and say, 'Look, here's a book that doesn't have all this other stuff, but wants to talk about other things like faith."
McVoy's own faith served her well when, just as she was completing revisions on the final draft last year, she learned she had breast cancer. She began chemotherapy as she sent off the final version.
"It makes you really aware of what you're capable of," she said. "I didn't think I would ever get cancer much less beat it, and I didn't think I'd ever write a novel — and I did both. And I think it makes me never make assumptions of my ability in either direction."
Terra McVoy reads and signs "Pure" on April 17 at 7:30 p.m. Little Shop of Stories, 133A East Court Square, Decatur, 404-373-6300.
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