Publishers Weekly
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Citchens debuts with a stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin, revolving around a Baptist preacher and his family. Rev. Sabre Winfrey Jr. is Dominion, Miss.’s most prominent citizen, the linchpin of the Black community, and the owner of a barbershop, radio station, and blocks of real estate. He’s also one hell of a letch. (As Citchens wryly puts it, he “believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.”) Indeed, Sabre’s sermons provide scant cover for the philandering his highly medicated wife Priscilla is powerless to rein in. But Dominion’s “First Lady” has an even bigger problem: her youngest son, Emmanuel, better known as Wonderboy—a star quarterback with the singing voice of an angel—has taken up with 17-year-old Diamond Bailey, a “worldy hussy” in Priscilla’s eyes. Neither she nor Diamond know how depraved Wonderboy has become or where he goes when he disappears at night, and their efforts to protect him risk repeating the sins of the father as Citchens reveals the snake coiled in the heart of Dominion’s prelapsarian garden. This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher shot through with unforgettable images (here’s Priscilla describing a church banquet where tickets for seating in “heaven” and “hell” were priced according to their value: “Hell was packed, but there was only one full table in heaven”). Readers will be stunned. (Aug.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A family unravels amid shocking violence in a Mississippi town. There’s no more envied family in Dominion, Mississippi, than the Winfreys. Their patriarch, Sabre Winfrey Jr., is a huge success: He’s the respected pastor of a huge Black Baptist church and the owner of a barbershop, a radio station, and real estate. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five sons, the youngest of whom, Emanuel, nicknamed Wonderboy, is a talented musician and star of the high school football team. It all sounds great, but there’s a darkness beneath the surface. Sabre is a womanizer and Priscilla has a bad alcohol and pill habit; even worse is Wonderboy’s predilection for sexually assaulting women. It’s possible he gets his sense of sexual entitlement from his father, who tells Priscilla that because “Eve ate the apple,” she herself would have to “eat the snake.” Their lives begin to unravel when Priscilla walks in on Wonderboy in a sexual encounter with Diamond, a young woman who loves him: “I couldn’t shake the energy that radiated off of him, and it didn’t feel playful and curious at all. It felt nuclear, dangerous, like someone I didn’t and couldn’t even know.” As Diamond falls deeper in love with Wonderboy, Priscilla gets more suspicious of both him and his father, and Wonderboy commits another shocking act of violence that he realizes he likely can’t get away with. Citchens’ prose is soaring, and she inhabits the voices of Priscilla and Diamond perfectly. Nothing in the book is sensationalized: Citchens treats the subject matter with the seriousness it requires, and she sensitively handles the trauma that some of her characters endure. This is an important novel that deftly tackles misogyny and hypocrisy. A stunning debut. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.