Lay It on My Heart

July 21, 2014
Pneuman uses potent prose in her intimate and intense debut novel about a most difficult month in the life of a 13-year-old girl in rural Kentucky. Charmaine Peake's grandfather was a famous evangelical, her father is a prophet, and the day-to-day life she leads with her parents is governed by religion. When her father suffers a mental break upon returning from a year in the Holy Land, the result is that Charmaine and her mother must move into a trailer by the river and rent out the family home to pay for his in-patient care. Meanwhile, Charmaine's physical maturation speeds up, and at her new school, she encounters others her age whose lives are not wholly dictated by their faith. Regular teenage angst is magnified by her attempts to live up to her father's ideals, and complicated by living in cramped quarters on a dime with a long-suffering mother. The author is very effective with her first-person narrative; readers will come to intimately inhabit Charmaine's point of view.

July 1, 2014
Pneuman's latest raises a tantalizing question about a 21st-century man of faith: How do you know if he's a prophet of God or just in need of some lithium?Thirteen-year-old Charmaine lives comfortably in East Winder, Kentucky, a town notable for its churches, its seminary and the evangelical legacy of Custer Peake, Charmaine's grandfather. Her father, David, is a prophet making a living writing spiritual tracts on fasting and ceaseless praying. That is, he was until last year, when he gave up his job to "live on faith alone" (with his mother, Daze, paying the mortgage and his wife, Phoebe, taking in sewing). Now he's back from a monthlong trip to the Holy Land, and Charmaine, Phoebe and Daze are hoping he'll return to work. Instead, arriving in robe and sandals, he goes into seclusion at the trailer he keeps down by the river. A few days later, he's found wandering about naked and burned, from taking a bath in bleach. While he's recuperating at a mental facility, Phoebe and Charmaine move into the trailer and rent their house to a family of sanctimonious missionaries. This is an inopportune time for Charmaine's family to fall apart: She's just starting middle school, her breasts have become embarrassingly large, and she has to ride the school bus with the country kids, who smoke and swear and don't live in the light of the Lord. Charmaine wishes her story would end like A Wrinkle in Time- the daughter's love rescues the father who disappears. Now on heavy medication, David no longer hears God. What does this mean for Phoebe, who has lived according to his visions, or for Charmaine, who believed her father anointed by God, not manic-depressive? In the narrative voice of a 13-year-old girl, Pneuman raises timeless questions about faith, sacrifice and parental folly.Both a compassionate and uncompromising coming-of-age tale.

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July 1, 2014
In her first novel, superb short story writer Pneuman (Home Remedies, 2007) tells the riveting tale of Charmaine Peake. Charmaine and her mother have been waiting for months for Charmaine's father to come home from the Holy Land, where the voice of God instructed him to wander. But when he returns unwilling and unable to reclaim the reins of domestic leadership, the Peake women find themselves scrounging for coins in the car at McDonald's while he languishes in a mental hospital. Her mom rents out their home to between-trips missionaries and retreats with her daughter to a ramshackle cabin by the river. Here, Charmaine's mother debates her future while Charmaine begs God to grant her a sense of purpose. But even God is changing shape, and as events unfold, Charmaine finds herself face-to-face with an adulthood none of the prophets in her family could have foretold. Pneuman's evocation of Charmaine and her surroundings is absolute and gripping, and her novel will please any lover of good fiction, especially those with a religious background and a sense of humor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)