National Book Award finalist: A newly arrived New Yorker disrupts a small Southern town with her claims of a heavenly vision.
Things used to be normal in Casper, Alabama. Charity Pittman was a regular fourteen-year-old, the perfect daughter, following in the footsteps of her prickly preacher of a father. But then Adrienne Dabney moves to town, with her big-city ways, artsy ideas, and a sensory deprivation experiment that’s cast her as an absolute New York weirdo. Reverend Pittman thinks it simpler than that—she’s the devil incarnate. Charity thinks she’s just amazing.
But no one knows what to think of Adrienne when, after a three-week meditative cleansing, she claims that she’s seen Jesus sitting in her living room. It’s a vision—and an admission—that splits the God-fearing community between heavenly believers and hell-raising skeptics. As people line up to see the divine Jesus chair, Charity is stuck somewhere in the middle, questioning her father, her religion—and herself.
Casper may have praying for a miracle, but it’s headed for disaster, in this “thought-provoking” story of a small town by the author of If I Should Die Before I Wake and Dancing on the Edge (School Library Journal).
