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Jesus Land: A Memoir
Entertainment Weekly calls this a memoir that "will break your heart and mend it again, but it won't stop haunting you." The New York Times Book Review calls it a "page-turner." From the publisher: "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)."
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
For Julia Scheeres and her adopted brother David, “Jesus Land” stretched from their parents’ fundamentalist home, past the hostilities of high school, and deep into a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. For these two teenagers – brother and sister, black and white – the 1980’s were a trial by fire.
In this memoir, Scheeres takes us from the familiar Midwest, a land of cottonwood trees and trailer parks, to a place beyond her imagining. At home, the Scheeres kids must endure the usual trials of adolescence – high-school hormones, incessant bullying, and the deep-seated restlessness of social misfits everywhere – under the shadow of virulent racism neither knows how to contend with. When they start to crack (or fight back), they are packed off to Escuela Caribe.
This brutal, prison-like “Christian boot camp” demands that its inhabitants repent for their sins – sins that few of them are aware of having committed. Julia and David’s determination to make it though with heart and soul intact is told here with immediacy, candor, sparkling humor, and not an ounce of malice. Jesus Land is, on every page, a keenly moving ode to the sustaining power of love, and rebellion, and the dream of a perfect family.
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