By Joy McCullough
Dutton / Penguin Random House, 2026
325 pages
978-0-593-85590-4
Age 13 and older
Author and playwright Joy McCullough recounts her experience of the abuse she endured by her youth pastor in the church led by her father, the senior pastor, when she was a 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old girl. McCullough’s memories are told chronologically through raw, sharp poems. Her precise, insightful, and informative writing is a masterpiece in verse. Yet the reckoning of her truth, brilliantly executed, is also a horrifying marvel of power and pain. McCullough’s personal story from her 1990s adolescence is juxtaposed with prose letters she has written to real girls and women from centuries and decades before her. Interspersed in the telling of her own snake den of abuse, lack of protection, trauma, and denial, McCullough addresses a historical sisterhood who suffered similar sins of patriarchy, lies, religion, and socialized violence. The letters convey empathy and curiosity; the factual footnotes underscore sickening parallels. Adding insult to the author’s injured adolescence is the infuriating and heartbreaking aftermath in her adulthood when revealing the crime to her sister, father, husband, attorneys, church leaders, and book editor. The calm, excruciating truth collides with vicious denial and willful ignorance. The book’s cover, an arresting still of an act of brutality, echoes McCollough’s own creative magnum opus as well as amplifies gender power dynamics since the beginning of time. An unforgettable title for teen readers. ©2026 Cooperative Children’s Book Center