Saving Maddie (review)

Maddie was Joshua's closest childhood friend, the two of them sharing their experience as children of strict Baptist preachers in their small southern town. After a five-year absence, Maddie is back as Madeline, a sensuous and rebellious young woman who arouses feelings in seventeen-year-old Joshua that lead him to reconsider his unquestioning submission to his parents' rules and expectations. Joshua's narration is immediate and yearning, and his struggle with identity is sympathetically relayed; refreshingly, his parents are genuinely dimensional and not simply straitlaced, making it all the more understandable that their son has had little thought to question their strictures. Madeline, though, is more of a device than a person, an encapsulation of everything Joshua's been expected to steer clear of, and the book can't quite let go of the problematic bad-girl/good-girl dichotomy even as Joshua keeps trying to change Madeline's category. This is therefore likely to appeal most to young readers who, like Joshua, are questioning their assumptions as they transition into making their own decisions about right and wrong.