Book Review: Solo Planet

Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling by Anna Broadway (NavPress, 2024).

As a friend of mine tweeted not long ago, it’s a crazy time to be a single person. From politicians and writers openly wishing that our votes counted for less, to fellow churchgoers tweeting about where we should be allowed to sit, everybody seems to have an opinion about us. And those opinions aren’t always charitable.

So it’s a great time for the release of Solo Planet by another friend of mine, Anna Broadway. Anna went on a trip around the world to explore and document the lives of single Christians, in order to help their brothers and sisters in the faith get to know them better. As she explains,

This book draws primarily on original research I completed during seventeen months of self-funded, in-person fieldwork across six continents. During that trip, I conducted long-form, semistructured interviews with 261 people, most of whom were unmarried at the time. All but nine people I spoke to in person. I spoke to another sixty-four people in eight groups of varying sizes. … After my last research stop, Los Angeles, I interviewed fourteen more people by phone and four more in person. The book also includes, with their permission, two men’s stories I learned through friendship rather than interviews. Solo Planet thus draws on conversations with 345 people from forty-eight countries.

That is a very wide variety of perspectives from single people of many ethnicities, in various stages of life, from three different strains of Christianity (Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy). It gives us an invaluable picture of the joys, sorrows, and frustrations of the Christian single life—of our many differences, and the many things we have in common. In a lot of ways it’s an eye-opener even for those of us who have some experience of that life.

Anna organizes her interviews and stories around the theme of single people’s needs, desires, and responsibilities (Community, Food, Housing, Parenting, and so on). There are sobering stories of congregants—including church staffers—suffering from poverty and hunger that even their pastors didn’t know about. There are frustrating stories of cultural customs that leave widows and widowers shunned and lonely, or lead the never-married to be regarded with suspicion. And then there are uplifting stories of Christians (both single and married) finding creative ways to help single people, whether it’s moving in with a lonely older person, or incorporating a single friend into annual family Christmas photos. (“Each year they get more creative. They spoofed exercise videos and magazine covers.”)

I would have liked a little more from the chapter on sexuality, especially as regards the painful topic of sexual abuse. Anna acknowledges that sexuality is a fraught subject that needs to be handled carefully. But the story of abuse that she focuses on involves a child who was finally able to make her abuser stop on her own—such a rare case that some disclaimers, and maybe some additional stories, would have been helpful to give a little perspective and remind us that this isn’t the norm. However, other difficult aspects of sexuality, and other difficult topics in general, are handled with great sensitivity, nuance, and compassion.

Interwoven with all these stories is the story of Anna’s own trip, which taught her to trust God in ways she’d never even imagined. The occasional need to find a host family in a foreign country just a few hours before nightfall—which made me twitch just reading about it—was the least of her worries. Other adventures she records are by turns amusing and terrifying: having to leave her sourdough starter in Singapore to avoid Australian quarantine; getting robbed at knifepoint; wearing out her clothes and having to locate a sewing machine in Panama City to make new ones. I spent much of the book in awe over her courage and wondering if I could ever trust God that much. (Honestly, I’m not sure.)

But what better way to demonstrate God’s care for single people than by living it out like this? Anna’s own story does as much as the many other stories she tells to show the humanity of single Christians—the brokenness and the beauty that we have in common with everyone around us, and the reality of God’s presence in our lives. For so many reasons, that makes it just the book we need right now.

(Cover image copyright NavPress.)

Book Links:

Solo Planet on Amazon
Solo Planet on Bookshop