Red, by Annie Cardi

When Tess becomes pregnant and decides that getting an abortion is her best option, part of her calculation is that no one back in Hawthorne will ever have to know that she was pregnant.  No one will ever ask her who the father is.  Things will go back to normal.  

But when she and her mother get back home, they are suprised to find that somehow people did find out.  A picture of them leaving the clinic is being distributed and someone has painted a red A on her locker.  Tess is no longer welcome by the congregation of their church or allowed to sing in her beloved church choir.

The hostility from the community is not nearly as hard as the loneliness that Tess feels.  But a chance meeting with a group of band geeks who don't seem to care about Tess's reputation help rebuild her confidence.  Gradually, through music, she puts her life back together and eventually confronts the events that caused her to need the abortion in the first place and challenge a pattern of abuse that she was caught up in.

I enjoyed Tess, a young woman with a strong sense of faith.  It's so easy in books like this to demonize organized religion, but Cardi creates a protagonist who refuses to let that happen.  She certainly suffers some doubts, but her constant reassertion that she doesn't want to lose the comfort of her religion is a nice change of pace.  While Cardi herself struggles a bit in differentiating between the faith and the people in power of the church, the most inspiring part of Tess for me was her desire to not allow herself to be driven off.

While Tess starts off being afraid to speak out and spends the arc of the story finding her voice, there's an articulate mind there all along, making an easy character to which to relate.  But while the book delivers a strong message about the insideous danger of silence in the face of sexual abuse and ends on an affirming note of empowerment, I found the story predictable and laborious in getting to its conclusion.  For all of the originality behind Tess (and in fact most of the characters in this novel), the lack of inspiration in what to do with them is a disappointment.  I was particularly disappointed in how quickly the musician friends are largely forgotten about in the end.