Jesus Land cover art

Jesus Land

A Memoir

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Jesus Land

By: Julia Scheeres
Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans
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Julia and her adopted brother, David, are 16 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 an all-encompassing racism. At home are 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 Caribea religious reform school in the Dominican Republic is characterized by a disciplinary regime that extracts repentance from its students by any means necessary. Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.

©2006 Julia Scheeres (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Art & Literature Authors Women Heartfelt Witty
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Critic reviews

“Like the best writers, Scheeres offers her characters in the fullness of the contradictions they hold in tension, and with great and clear-sighted empathy, and at the end of the audiobook, the listener might say: They’re so much like me.” (Salon.com)
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Reading so many books like this and all of these parents are so obsessively fixed on religion that is supposed to bring them joy, but they are the most miserable, unhappy, fearful and angry people! It’s a complete contradiction. Why would anyone want to follow a religion that wants you to beat your kids.

Every time I listen I think Reece Witherspoon is narrating!

Barbaric

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Horrified at the parents in this story immensely sick & sadistic parents belong behinds bars, Julie sounds very bright & seems to have a lot of emotional strenght she certainly needed it.

Evil Alice & well & living in middle america

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