Jesus Land

Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and all-encompassing racism.

At home lives a distant mother―more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children―and a violent father. In this riveting and heartrending memoir, Julia Scheeres takes us from the Midwest to a place beyond imagining. Surrounded by natural beauty, the Escuela Caribe―a religious reform school in the Dominican Republic―is characterized by a disciplinary regime that extracts repentance from its students by any means necessary. As Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals, their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and “unadorned, dark humor” (Los Angeles Times).