Duck Egg Blue

This thinly veiled diatribe against the religious right is betrayed by its bombast. When 14-year-old Cameron Wright appears before his local Boy Scout review board to qualify for his Eagle badge, he is astonished when a board member asks him whether he believes in God. Cameron answers that he's not sure, in spite of the fact that his father is an elder of the Lutheran church. His parents are divorced, and he attends his mother's church, he explains. The board rejects his application, with encouragement to come back after he has ""thought it over."" It turns out that Cameron's right-wing fundamentalist father, a stereotypical self-righteous bigot, has engineered this little scene. Cameron's mother, Harmony, is Wright senior's opposite, a lovely New Age heroine. When she falls for Mark, her son's science teacher, she explains her reasons for having married, and divorced, the horrific John. Mark is having troubles of his own as his school pressures him to teach creationism as well as the theory of evolution. Predictable obstacles to their love affair and Cameron's romance with a classmate fail to generate suspense. Regardless of their beliefs, most readers will be bored by the lack of storytelling skills and character development here. Neill's (Adventures in Spacetime) intentions are good but his blatant message hampers a potentially provocative theme. (Apr.)