Revival Season
- eBook
- Paperback
- Audiobook
- Hardcover
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
The daughter of one of the South’s most famous Baptist preachers discovers a shocking secret about her father that puts her at odds with both her faith and her family in this debut novel.
“Spellbinding…Revival Season should be read alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” —The Washington Post
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. But, this summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and her faith.
When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the following year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam.
Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community.
Release date: May 25, 2021
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Print pages: 304
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
Revival Season
Monica West
We had been standing close to this exact spot on the night when she’d asked me to heal her. Breathless, I approached Dawn’s closed passenger door and banged on the window. She opened it and stepped outside; I followed her around the side of the car to the rusted trunk. Her face had more color in it, her cheeks chubbier, her breathing at normal intervals as she spoke to me.
“Hi, Miriam,” she said. “I tried to find you earlier but didn’t see you during the service.”
“I was cooking in the back.”
She looked at the front of my flour-covered apron and nodded. I hadn’t thought about what I would say to her when I saw her; I grasped the apron’s fabric and ran it between my fingers as I tried to formulate the right question. “How are you feeling?”
“That’s why I wanted to find you.” She leaned closer to me, and her voice dropped. “I felt weird right after the—you know—so it seemed like all the other times.” Another gust of wind ripped through the parking lot—she paused and looked around. A few other parishioners mingled outside, making small talk that wafted over to where we stood.
“I went back to my cardiologist for a checkup. Do you know what they told me?”
I shook my head. Dawn’s father rolled down the window and poked his head out. “Hurry up, honey. We’re running late,” he said.
“Coming.”
“What did they say?”
“My heart function is normal. I can’t remember the last time I had a normal checkup. The doctors couldn’t believe it, especially since I haven’t had the latest surgery yet.”
“Honey!” her father called.
“Gotta go. Thanks, Miriam. See you around.”
She wrapped me in a hurried embrace and jogged back to the car door as though she’d been jogging all her life. That had to be proof of something. I held on to that picture as she looked around once again with a wan smile before sinking into the car’s upholstery.
I played her words over and over again. Maybe, like with Micah, a normal checkup could just mean that an abnormal one was on the horizon. But maybe it had worked. Euphoria should have felt like all my neurons and synapses firing at the same time— something that should have made my body feel lighter—but I sank onto the ground. My hands grasped small piles of gravel next to the tiny rainbows that appeared in the shiny black oil puddle. I closed my lips around a prayer that I couldn’t utter aloud, the prayer that ran counter to everything I’d ever learned or been taught: Thank You, Lord, for healing Dawn through me. Give me the strength to seek You and do Your will.
In bed in the middle of the night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my hands had touched something and made it whole again. But then my thoughts were interrupted by music that wasn’t gospel riding the heat currents through the vent beneath my bed. At first I thought I was dreaming, but the music continued even after I got up and crept downstairs, passing the front window where I saw an empty driveway. Papa had been leaving early a lot more these days, staying gone for hours at a time and offering no explanation about where he’d been when he returned. I imagined long, closed-door meetings with the deacon board as he tried to replace Deacon Johnson, meetings that were too volatile for him to let us overhear. When I got closer to the kitchen, the music slid into my veins—the hi-hat’s tinny tapping was persistent as guitars and drums faded, leaving nothing but a woman’s mournful voice singing about a man who left her, her high notes breaking away from the music and modulating until they landed on a sound more animal than human. A pair of feet padded a syncopated rhythm in the kitchen’s dimness—quick steps that were out of pace with the slow words and music. When I craned my neck around the corner, all of the weight of Ma’s growing body was raised on the balls of her feet. Her eyes were closed, and her right arm was bent several inches in front of her as though she were holding someone who wasn’t there. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her, unencumbered by the heaviness of pregnancy and revival season that had stooped her shoulders. I watched her reflection as she passed the black mirrored pools of the kitchen windows; my eyes slid to her undulating hips that drove her from the cabinets to the stove, buffeting her against the refrigerator and back toward the sink, her face tilted upward. Her limbs threaded together in front of her, swimming their way to the light. Carnal, Papa probably would have muttered if he had been here, but this wasn’t the evil of the flesh that he said was sin. For a moment, I saw the dancer that she’d been before she met Papa.
I leaned against the doorjamb, my shoulder touching the wall. I couldn’t shift my eyes from her, from the smile that tickled the sides of her mouth as her lips formed words to lyrics that I’d never heard her say: “I’ll be your lover. Better than any other. I’ll make you moan and scream with ecstasy.” Her lips should have stumbled over these words, but there was only unfettered joy behind her closed, fluttering eyelids as her languid limbs moved like they were floating underwater. I wondered how many nights she went downstairs while we slept, a thin floor the only thing separating us. The song ended and her eyes opened and focused on me as the opening chords to a new song filled the room. Her mouth widened in shock, and she wrapped her hands around her nightgown as though she were naked.
“Did I wake you up?” She transformed in front of me, jamming the screen of her phone until the room was quiet. Her scared eyes darted as her neck craned around me.
“He’s not here.”
Her shoulders relaxed, and she collapsed in the kitchen chair— all the vibrancy in her face and body slowly left the room. I took the chair across from her.
“I’ve never seen you dance like that, Ma.” She shrugged.
“Can you teach me?”
A sparkle in the corner of her normally dimmed eyes provided a glimmer of the Ma I’d just seen. She pressed both hands against the table and turned toward the door once more. When she got to her feet, she stretched out her hand toward me. I grabbed it, and she pulled me to a standing position—soon we were in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her phone began another song with a quicker beat like the rat tat tat tat of sudden rain against a windowsill. She crooked her arm around the small of my back and pressed me against the hard, protruding mound of her stomach, flattening her breasts against mine as she collapsed the gap between us with one swift jerk of her arm. Our bodies moved as one, her hips rocking a couple seconds before mine caught up. My clumsy body was off-kilter as it rammed into hers, bouncing us off each other and sending me away from her in a twirl—when I stopped spinning and found her again, she was extending her arm across the kitchen toward me.
She spun me again, all while singing along to the lyrics. We danced until that song ended and then through another few songs until I lost count.
By the time the sun burned the sky orange, we fell to the floor breathless, spread-eagle beside one another. My laugh intertwined with hers until they were inextricable from each other, and her chest heaved and fell in rapid succession. I’d heard her laugh before—at Caleb’s dumb jokes over dinner or Papa’s impressions of church members. But this laugh was different—it was bright and bold. The first real laugh since what had happened with Papa the night after Micah’s healing service. I looked over next to me at where she lay with eyes closed and hair splayed against the floor like a sunburst.
“You’re pretty good,” she said to the ceiling when her breathing returned to normal.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“It’s all the contemporary classes I took in high school. Before things got bad.” She rolled over on her side and perched her chin in her palm. Her laughing eyes became mournful as they searched mine. She reached out and placed a palm on the side of my face, her fingertips grazing my cheekbone that was prominent like hers. Our twin faces in different bodies, she liked to say.
“I kept saying that I couldn’t marry a man like my father. And your dad was different in the early years. But I feel like I don’t know him anymore. And I’ve been meaning to say that I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
The front door clicked. We sprang from where we were sprawled on the floor—Ma opened cupboards, clanging pots and pans together in an elaborate charade of making breakfast as I pressed the pause button on her phone and shoved it in the pocket of my robe. Papa’s loud footsteps came down the hallway, and Ma’s trembling hands made the heavy cast-iron skillet handle rattle against the burner. As he stopped at the edge of the kitchen, I folded and refolded a dish towel into sections, watching the thread loops line up like a row of tiny nooses.
I sidestepped to the edge of the kitchen until my spine flattened against the refrigerator door. Ma greeted him with a tentative embrace, her face seemingly trying to gauge how long he had been waiting on the porch, what he had heard. His arms were relaxed by his sides even as Ma hugged him hello.
“You’re back early. Do you want some breakfast?”
“I’m starving.”
With Papa’s focus on Ma, I slowly crept upstairs. Back in my room, I sank into my bed—feeling some comfort that I wasn’t the only one with twin selves. Ma didn’t heal, but she kept a whole other side shielded from Papa. I would have to follow her example and separate my selves as well. When alone, I would drape my power around my shoulders like a cape, but before leaving the sanctum of my room, I would have to revert to the Miriam I had learned how to be—the Miriam who held her tongue and stayed quiet the way Papa expected.
The following week after services, I felt a delicate hand on my shoulder. It was a girl from the congregation whose round face I recognized even though I didn’t know her name. “Nadia,” she whispered before asking me to heal her. There was another girl after that—Suzette—who made her request as I snuck to the bathroom, away from Papa’s presence but still within earshot of the loudspeaker booming his words about obedience and submission. Papa would have wanted me to turn them away, would have struck me in the face if he knew what I was doing. So I kept my secret from him, from all of them, as I moved away from the danger of the main sanctuary for the later healings. I healed Nadia of her psoriasis by the sink in a locked bathroom while erratic knocks interrupted us from outside. Suzette’s migraines were harder—we were crowded in the closet of the claustrophobic annex where Micah had passed out. At the end of each healing, when I saw double and they reeled in front of me, I told them to say that Papa had done it if anyone asked.
Later the night of Suzette’s healing, I lay awake in bed, the words that had declared her migraines a thing of the past wet on my lips. A hollow in my stomach felt like hunger, but it couldn’t have been, since I’d just devoured Ma’s fried chicken—the ravenousness a new side effect of healing that Ma, as she scooped me another helping of corn, chalked up to growing pains.
Outside the open window, a baby’s plaintive cry caught the night wind and entered my room—its boldness a reminder that Isaiah had never had the chance to cry. I conjured him back. No one knew I had touched him as he passed from Papa to the paramedics, had felt the curve of his swollen belly that never ate, had traced the edges of his mute, open mouth. My hand had fallen to my side at that moment, not expecting the rubbery coldness of his scentless skin, but I could have kept it there and whispered a prayer over him then, tracing a dry sign of the cross over his eyes that probably would have been deep brown and pensive—like Caleb’s— if only they had opened.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...