Jesus Land: A Memoir - Julia Scheeres
This is a heartbreaking account of a young white girl and her adopted black brothers growing up in a strict, fundamentalist home in the 80s. Julia's life at home was filled with abuse and tragedy. She was sexually abused by her older adopted brother, Jerome, and neglected by her family. She experienced the evils of racism because of her close relationship to her other adopted brother, David. Her home life reflected a prison and she, quite naturally, rebelled against it. When her teenage rebellion became too much for her parents to stand, they sent her and David to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic where Julia and David struggled to survive abusive authority in the name of God. Julia's story is an example of how religion can go sour. The authoritarian, moralistic, abusive religion Julia experiences is sickening, to say the least. Tragically, neither God nor religion are Julia's real problem - although this will be the conclusion of many readers. The kind of religion Julia experiences is no more reflective of true religion than the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials are a reflection of the true practice of medicine and scientific experimentation. That aside, Julia's story is a true horror story. I am grateful she has survived. I am also grateful she took the time to write this compelling and provocative memoir. My only criticism: her parents are painted in such two-dimensional dimensions. Julia does not have anything positive at all to say about them, and thus they take on a "monster" status - they are reduced to caricatures and dehumanized and therefore easy to hate. Surely, there must be more to this couple than Julia cares to remember.