Assignment 1; Losing Faith

"Losing Faith", a young reader's novel written by Denise Jaden, starts out with introducing the main character, Brie, and her sister, Faith. Brie's is the black sheep of her family, not being nearly as religious as her sister, who's been going to a Church Youth Group since she was little. Brie lies to Faith, telling her she needs a ride to church. Once they get to the church, they go their separate ways and Brie runs off to meet her boyfriend, Dustin. They go off to a party at a barn, and while they're there, Brie gets a call from her dad, telling her she needs to go to the hospital. She ditches the party and gets a ride from her best friend, Amy. Once she's at the hospital, she receives the news that Faith has passed away, the cops tell them that they found her body at the base of a cliff, and the go through the whole questioning process. Brie tries to come up with plans to help her family- talking to her parents but getting shut down, or read a poem at Faith's funeral which she ends with saying that she loved and hated Faith- but they all end up failing. On the day of Faith's funeral, a mysterious guy shows up and leaves Brie wondering who he is and how he knows Faith. Through the chapters, Brie discovers many things that relate to Faith's cause of death, which was supposedly "suicide". All these clues that she finds all point to that assumption, the very same assumption she refuses to believe ended her sister's life. At school, Amy quits talking to Brie, seeing as how people only know her as "the dead girl's sister", she's finally seeing what a jerk her boyfriend really is, and the school "freak", Tessa,  is appearing randomly before her at school. Soon, Tessa and Brie start talking after Tessa reveals to Brie that her sister also died in accident, and understands how Brie feels. As she tries to find out more clues to her sister's death, Brie unfortunately finds out (the hard way) that Dustin and Amy have secretly been seeing each other. Later on, Brie confronts Celest, Faith's best friend, about her random disappearances and tries to get some information out of her. When that fails, she tries to get information about a boy she saw at Faith's funeral. Turns out his name's Alis, and his sister, Reena, was friends with Faith.
I think that Denise Jaden wrote this book to teach us about how much Religion plays a part in our lives. She talks about cults and all these devoted groups to religion and how some actually do think about sacrificing themselves for God. When I was reading the book, I at first didn't really pay attention to the main message, I thought it was just going to be another chick novel. But then as I kept on reading, I found that the message about religion was really prominent in the whole story and I just couldn't put it down.