Almost-fifteen-year-old Alis has never been out of her sheltered religious community, and despite the many rules she must live under (which caused her brother to flee years before), has lived a fairly contented life. However, everything changes when her parents tell her that she must marry the village’s 40 year old minister. Alis decides that she must run away to the city to escape this unwanted future – hopefully she will find her brother and together they will live a life of freedom.

She takes the first step toward escape by convincing her parents to allow her to accompany an ailing visitor back to a neighboring village, one much stricter than her own. Here she manages to make an enemy of an incredibly cruel Elder as well as fall in love with a strongwilled village boy who helps her to escape to the city when the Elder accuses her of burning down the prayer house.

Life in the city is much more frightening and hard than Alis had anticipated and she ends up returning, nearly broken, to her village and agreeing to marry the minister. Her return sets off a chain of events that will change her life and those of her family forever.

With religious extremism so much in the news these days (and threatening to enter our White House) a lot of this book hit me pretty hard. As a staunch supporter of women’s rights, women’s freedom, freedom of religion and the separation of church and state it was difficult to not see a lot of this book as a metaphor for the more extreme parts of today’s world. Alis manages to grow up single-minded in a community that encourages anything but and find her own way in the world and her own happiness. Hers is a world that does not make that easy. Sometimes our world seems to be the same.

I think ALIS has a lot to say and is very worthwhile reading.

Publisher: Penguin (Viking)

Pub Date: February 19, 2009