GODLESS

"Why mess around with Catholicism when you can have your own customized religion? All you need is a disciple or two. And a god." So says narrator Jason Bock, a high schooler rebelling against the church "outreach" program his father insists he attend. On the spur of the moment, he starts his own church, the Chutengodians, who worship the "Ten-legged God" their town's water tower. It begins as a joke, with Jason and his friends creating rules that he thinks are as arbitrary as the rules of the Catholic Church (they observe Sabbath on Tuesday, the first commandment is "thou shalt not be a jerk"), but Jason's "followers" begin taking the new religion seriously. Many teens will likely recognize or identify with Hautman's (Sweetblood ; Mr. Was ) religious critiques; others may be offended (discussing Holy Communion, Jason describes the host as "a sliver of Jesus meat. But they make the host as different from meat as they can, so that even though communion is a form of cannibalism, nobody gets grossed out"). However, while Hautman pushes his satirical story line to the limit, he doesn't bring to it the depth or subtlety of his previous works (for example, Jason's dare to others to disprove that the water tower is God doesn't elicit the obvious response that the tower is man-made). The result is a provocative plot, but not an entirely challenging novel. Ages 12-up. (June)