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Jesus Land

By: Julia Scheeres
Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans
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Publisher's Summary

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.

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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He dies at the end

Just saved you hours of crying. I know it's what really happened so she couldn't avoid it, but he fought so hard for everything. I guess this book moved me enough to hate it for how much it moved me.

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