What happens when a preacher’s daughter falls in love with another girl—and begins questioning the beliefs that have defined her entire life?
Ruthie Brown is fourteen years old, the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor, and deeply devoted to her family and faith.
Then Ellen Ayers moves from Chicago to Boaz, Alabama.
Ellen’s mother will teach biology at Boaz High School. Ruthie and Ellen quickly become inseparable, and what begins as friendship deepens into love.
Their relationship forces Ruthie to confront questions she has never seriously examined: what her church teaches about sexuality, what she has inherited from her father, how religious certainty fits with evolutionary science, and what happens when lived experience begins to conflict with long-accepted belief.
Over nearly two years, late-night biology study sessions and three pivotal trips to Mentone carry Ruthie and Ellen through a coming-of-age journey shaped by love, faith, science, family, and the search for truth.
What never changes is the one thing they understand from the beginning:
their love for each other.
Beneath the Story
God and Girl is a coming-of-age story, but beneath the romance are questions that continue to appear throughout my fiction.
It asks:
- What happens when inherited belief collides with lived experience?
- Can love survive when family, faith, and community place pressure against it?
- What responsibility does a person have to examine beliefs received from people they love?
- What happens when religious certainty encounters scientific evidence?
- Can doubt become an act of honesty rather than betrayal?
- How much of identity is inherited, and how much must eventually be chosen?
Ruthie’s journey places her at the intersection of belief and doubt, loyalty and independence, love and fear, truth and inheritance.
About the Novel
Genre: Coming-of-Age / Southern Fiction / Family Drama
Setting: Boaz and Mentone, Alabama
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
From Richard
God and Girl was my first published novel.
Looking back, I can see that many of the questions that continue to interest me as a novelist were already present: inherited belief, religious certainty, family loyalty, identity, love, scientific evidence, and what happens when experience begins to challenge what a person has always been taught.
The novel is different in tone and subject from many of the books that followed, but the underlying concern is familiar: what does an ordinary person do when the beliefs that once seemed settled no longer fit the world as it is actually being experienced?
