`Why does God let his children suffer?'
Monica West's Revival Season is an emotionally fecund and spellbinding debut novel that opens with a Black family on a road trip through the American South during the summer of 2018. The Hortons leave their home in Texas in search of souls to save and bodies to heal. The family is helmed by a wounded healer, Samuel, a prizefighter turned pastor who rules his home with an iron fist. Joanne, his wife, is a prisoner in her marriage who bears the brunt of her husband's emotional and physical abuse. The elder son, Caleb, is eager to mould himself in his domineering father's image. Hannah, the youngest child, has cerebral palsy. Hannah's disability is a kind of liability for the curative powers from which Papa derives his reputation and on whose earning power the family depends. The story is deftly narrated by Miriam, a 15-year-old girl who is wrestling with her father's brutality, her faith in God, her mother's unravelling and the revelation of her own healing powers.
Revival Season is haunted by two shadows: Samuel's vicious handling of a pregnant teenager brought to him for healing during a previous revival, and the spectre of Samuel and Joanne's stillborn child, Isaiah. We spend much of the novel on tenterhooks, wondering how and when the lid on the father's explosive anger will blow, and hoping for the best outcome for Joanne's new pregnancy, about which she is ambivalent at best. Miriam asks the question on which the book turns: “Why does God let his children suffer?”
West joins American writers who have tackled the significance of the Black church that serves as a locus for community organizing and mutual aid but also can harm those who seek spiritual refuge. Revival Season echoes James Baldwin's debut 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. West's book shows the problems with appointing fallible human beings to offer succour to parishioners even as they battle their own demons. The book questions the church's stance on the roles of women, most important, that wives should submit to their husbands, and that women cannot serve as pastors and healers.
Miriam is an unforgettable narrator whose storytelling evinces vulnerability, grace, grit and self-awareness. Revival Season offers a refreshing take on the lives of Black women and girls living with disabilities, depression and domestic violence. West avoids predictable tropes in writing about Hannah's disability, making her neither less than human nor an object of pity. It's nearly impossible to avoid falling in love with Miriam.