Truest

Sommers debuts with a summer romance that gives questions of faith a complex, satisfying treatment. Seventeen-year-old West Beck is a pastor’s daughter in small-town Minnesota, and she has been dating the school football star for years. Then the beautiful Hart twins, Silas and Laurel, enter West’s life. Suddenly, she is pulled into a flirtatious relationship with Silas and a friendship with Laurel, who has a rare psychological condition, solipsism syndrome, which causes her to doubt reality entirely. As the romantic connection between West and Silas becomes clearer to them both, they puzzle through their relationships with God, the meaning of life, and the complicated role West’s father plays as a town pastor who is rarely there for his own family. For these two thoughtful teens, faith isn’t an obstacle for their explorations of love (and sex), and although the events of the last third of this novel verge on overdramatic, in contrast to the deep philosophical conversations and carefully constructed relationships that precede them, Sommers’s prose and her instincts for character shine. Ages 13–up. Agent: Steven Chudney, Chudney Agency. (Sept.)