I think I’m well-positioned to review this book, because I grew up with Julia and David Scheeres. More precisely, we all went to Lafayette Christian School through eighth grade. Both Julia and David were in my brother’s elementary school class, one year ahead of me. Jerome, her older adopted brother, was in the class two years ahead of me. Lafayette Christian figures heavily in the story, although the story itself takes place starting two years after graduation from that school.I can’t decide quite what to make of “Jesus Land.” It is a compelling memoir of sufferings undergone. I can confirm certain gruesome external details about Julia’s upbringing, so the criticisms comparing it to “A Million Little Pieces” and similar fabulist works are unfair, and I expect that her Escuela Caribe experience was pretty much just as she described it. I knew David Scheeres, and he was an excellent kid with a great heart, just as he is described (unlike his adoptive brother Jerome, whom I also knew, and who was a very bad actor even a child).Without going into unnecessary detail, for example, I can confirm personally seeing either welts or scars (at this remove, I cannot say which) all across David’s and Jerome’s backs from whippings with some instrument. This was not regarded as normal, but as Scheeres said, back then nobody would do anything about such things. So while I never knew her parents personally, it seems to me entirely possible they were just as bad as she portrays. (Her father is apparently dead, though she does not mention it. She does not mention what happened to Jerome, but a simple Google search suggests that at least in 2011 he was still living in the same geographic area, because he was arrested for marijuana possession.)But “Jesus Land” is undermined and worsened by numerous small factual inaccuracies, and frankly, fictions. One could say that these are poetic license. But they are not poetic. Nor are they accidental. Rather, they are all in the service of what is the book’s prime vice, which is that it is written for, and only for, a specific audience and target market. That market is leftist agnostics and atheists who have contempt not only for Christianity but for every person who lives in flyover country. You see this in that Scheeres repeatedly notes she lives in Berkeley, in order to signal to the reader she is Not That Kind Of Person. Only the Right Kind Of Person, of course, is invited onto NPR and other media outlets; hence the continual dripping contempt for anyone not fitting the author’s mold of A Desirable Person (which apparently zero people in Indiana do).One possible response is “So”? Leftist atheists need love, and books directed at them, too. But the problem with small inaccuracies, or falsehoods, is that they undermine confidence in the rest of the narrative. What also undermines and coarsens the book is the cardboard nature of everyone portrayed. They all are grossly deficient in every way, and characterized as such with contemptuous adjectives. Bus drivers are “fat.” French teachers teach “in a constipated voice.” The barrage of contempt is never-ending and highly distracting. (It only lets up when the author talks about what is apparently the real “Jesus Land,” namely Berkeley.)Anyway, on the inaccuracies. None are huge; it’s their cumulative effect and direction which undermine the narrative. Most would not be visible to more than a few people alive today. In particular, a very substantial percentage of the specific statements about Lafayette Christian are false. Lafayette Christian was (and is) a Reformed, or Calvinist, school, as Scheeres notes. What she does not note is that Reformed students were a minority; the school had many different types of Christians welcomed and accepted as students, including Catholics (such as me). So here’s a not-exclusive list of further incorrect statements in the book:1) “Until [1981], we attended a Dutch Calvinist school as well, where all the kids were blonde and lanky like me.” I have in my hand a picture of the graduating class of David and Julia Scheeres and another of my class. In the pictures, only four children have blonde hair. Blonde hair was simply not the norm. This would not matter, except it is an attempt to hide the actual diversity of the school (and probably to vaguely imply Nazi-type leanings).2) As to Jews, Scheeres says “Jesus-killers, we called them at Lafayette Christian.” This is frankly ludicrous. I suppose it’s possible that the “we” meant some children in private conversations. But the phrasing is clearly meant to imply that’s what the school authorities said and therefore endorsed. Which is, as I say, ludicrous.3) “At Lafayette Christian, there was no sex ed class.” This is false (it is said in support of “Everything I know about being female I learned from a Kotex box.”) Sex ed was taught every two years to both boys and girls, separately. It was taught to the 5th/6th graders and separately to the 7th/8th graders (the advanced class!) My classes were exactly coterminous with Scheeres’s, so I know they were offered. Again, this is an attempt to paint the school as blinkered and dangerously parochial, which it most assuredly was not.4) On the first day of school, a high school math teachers’ responds to a girl identifying herself as “Goldstein” with “Jew name, isn’t it?” That is very, very unlikely. Similarly unlikely is that a gravestone from the 19th Century spelled “died” as “dyed.” Again—these are simply fictions designed to make Indiana seem like a horrible place to be. In fact, Scheeres specifically says “My parents’ own state, Indiana, had once been a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and was still a haven for backwater bigots.” (She does not seem to know that the Indiana Klan was much more opposed to Catholics than black people, though.) 5) Scheeres bizarrely claims her mother, a surgeon’s wife, initially feared if she touched her own black adopted baby, “the black would rub off on her hands.”6) Scheeres says that as a teenager, having just moved to the country (actually, to a rural area only a few miles from my house on the edge of West Lafayette, a fairly cosmopolitan college town), she saw a series of plywood signs “bear[ing] a hand-scrawled message.” This consists of four signs, among them “Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN” and “The end is neer: REPENT.” Maybe. But I lived on the edge of that same countryside at the exact same time, and not only did I never see any billboards advising people to repent (which do crop up sometimes in Indiana), but I never saw any type of hand-made sign. And, what shows this to be false most of all, is the mis-spelling. People in Indiana can spell just fine. But that would not advance the author’s narrative. Much of the flavor of the book paints Indiana as a hybrid of a KKK rally and a liberal’s Facebook feed about WalMart, crudely designed to play to the prejudices of Scheeres’ Berkeley/NPR crowd.7) I think it highly unlikely that racism was ubiquitous as portrayed in the environments in which David Scheeres was raised. For example, much is made of supposed racism of children in the Kingston pool (which was in West Lafayette, not the country). I spent much of several summers there, and I remember David playing there frequently as well (they lived close to the pool at that time). I don’t remember any racist comments. And Lafayette Christian did not tolerate racism (they were, in fact, appalled at the Dutch Afrikaans behavior in South Africa, because they felt they were tarred with that brush as Dutch co-religionists). There was one family at the school with two boys, one in my class, which was openly racist, but the children had to tell their racist jokes in hushed tones, like dirty jokes, because they knew they would be severely punished if the teachers found out.Finally, the book takes lots of actual poetic license, too, which leads to anachronisms. Jolt Cola was first marketed in 1985, but she refers to it as existing in 1983/1984. A scene where racist kids at the Kingston pool only leave David alone when a minivan arrives must take place prior to 1981, but the first minivan was sold in 1984. And so on. Again, not a huge deal, but when it undermines confidence in the book for readers—even though, as I say, I think all the key elements of author’s personal story in the book are almost certainly accurate.Every author has to choose an audience. The tragedy is that by her secondary choices, Scheeres targeted this book to people who already thought Christians were stupid, evil, bigots or all three, and doubtless succeeded in reinforcing those views. (Scheeres also appears to have been instrumental in the closure of Escuela Caribe, though, so the book does appear to have had some other beneficial impact.) A better choice would have been to write a less vitriolic book, targeted to a broader, more open-minded audience than Berkeley drones, that could have been read by average, normal people all over the country (even in barbaric Indiana!) as a guide to what not to do.
Julia Scheeres's train wreck of a memoir is divided into two parts. The first focuses on her upbringing in a strict, abusive Calvinist family. In an apparently self-deluded display of Christian charity her parents have adopted two black boys, whom they not only abuse but fail to protect from the inevitable racism of 1980s middle America. The older boy, Jerome, rebels; the younger boy, David, whom Julia is memorializing in this book, dreams of a happy, functional family but only Julia is receptive to returning his affection. As David and Julia's unhappiness grows, they each act out and become self-destructive in their own ways. David grows increasingly depressed and withdrawn and begins to engage in self-harm, while Julia drinks on the quiet and gets into a dead-end sexual relationship with a boy at school who is clearly using her. Eventually David gets sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic, followed by Julia a bit later. The second half of the memoir describes their experience in the reform school, which is its own abusive environment.My recurring thought as I read this was that I never want to read another dysfunctional-family-and-abuse memoir. The first part of this book was worse than The Glass Castle A Memoir, with its neverending game of "Top this:" The mother is distant and seems to views her kids as an unwelcome irritation, feeding them "garbage soup" made of random, often spoiled leftovers ("Waste not, want not!"). But wait -- the father is physically abusive and breaks David's arm. But wait -- Jerome molests Julia repeatedly. But wait -- Jerome sets Julia up to be gang-raped. But wait -- one of the would-be gang rapists ends up using Julia for sex nightly, accepting the title and privileges of "boyfriend" but none of the responsibility, and Julia, starved for affection and for any means of fleeting escape from her brutal situation, accepts this. I mean, how much of this can you read already? I understand why many goodreaders were skeptical about the events, and noted the one-dimensional portrayal of the book's many villains. This is an age of wildly sensationalist and dubious tell-all memoirs, and while I don't claim to know whether "Jesus Land" belongs in that category, it certainly felt over the top at times. And if in fact all this really did happen to Julia, well, it was just too painful for words."Top this" continues as David and Julia are relocated to the reform school. David and Julia's parents are paying mega-bucks for their children to sleep on thin foam pads and be minimally fed. But wait -- some of the staff are abusive, certainly verbally and sometimes physically. But wait -- the first preacher gets one of the teens pregnant. But wait -- the replacement preacher then threatens Julia in a highly graphic and sado-sexual way. But wait -- letters home from the kids which fail to offer sugarcoated descriptions of life at the reform school are censored, and students who write these letters are punished severely. I should really start a shelf for "car accident books" -- books that describe horrifying events that turn your stomach but are somehow impossible to look away from. But I won't start that shelf, because I hope I never have to read another book like this. I could really use some fluffy chick lit about now.
What do You think about Jesus Land (2006)?
This memoir points out a lot of the problems I have with certain religious types. The author's parents adopt two black children in the name of charity but then proceed to neglect all of their children, trying to substitute their own lack of ability to love with God's love.Things get to a point where the author passively experiences racism, rape and complete subjugation of her free will in a very matter-of-fact and observational way. She's numb to what's happening even as she tells it in her own memoir. As the story moves from racist Indiana to the Dominican Republic it shows a world where youth ministries are just outlets for the sadistic.In the end, was it Julia's fault? Or David's? Or their parents? Or Jesus? Those kids would've had a better life raised in a secular house.My biggest complaint of the book was the author's detachment from her own events and her inability to act. I found that frustrating. But the incredible epilogue in a way completely washes those complaints away.
—Darnell
I really had to think how I was going to talk about this book. As I read about Julia’s life there were many times I wanted to quit. Not because of her writing style but because the story was so hard to digest. I come from a hard childhood myself and this memoir dredged up some difficult memories for me. I have read many books about people coming from rough back rounds and leaving the faith of their childhood, but none as heart wrenching as this. It always surprises me the things people as willing to do in the name of god.This is a memoir about a great many things. Religion washes over all of the themes. Racism, inter-family relationships, adoption, adolescence/coming of age, sexual, physical, emotional and mental abuse, and finally hope. She describes the people in her childhood in vivid terms and I could really visualize them and hear their voices in my head. I loved reading about David, Julia’s brother. I found myself rooting for him the whole book. To me, the most important theme that stood out in the book was religion vs. love, compassion and civility. Over and over the adults in the lives of Julia and David chose religion over love and the others. It amazed me that David and Julia could love each other so steadfastly as siblings. It seemed they had no real examples of love in their lives or even civility for that matter.In the end what kept me engaged in this book were two things. First, I almost never quit reading a book. I have to know how it ends. Secondly, I had hope. Hope that someone would rescue these kids from their awful lives. Hope that in the end they would find comfort and happiness on the warm beaches of Florida. I found the ending to be bittersweet at best, as life often is. Realizing that as in my own childhood, the rescuers never came, in the end you have to rescue yourself.I would recommend this book. I will warn readers that it is not an easy read. There is much sadness and trauma within the pages. If you have PTSD around religion or abuse as I do beware. It tripped many of my triggers. If you read or have read the book I would love to hear your impressions.
—Debbie Mcnulty
(Alex Awards, non-fiction)What an interesting book! This story focuses on Julia, a white girl, and her adopted brother, David, who is black. Her parents are “Jesus freaks” and frequently beat their adopted black children. Julia loves David, but has difficultly showing it. Her brothers are the only black people in their small, rural Indiana town and are the subject of racial slurs and attacks. David is a good kid, but he acts out once and is sent to “Escuela Caribe” in the Dominican Republic. Their parents claim is a Christian Reform school, but it is, in essence, a jail. Julia is soon sent there as well. Julia is incredibly honest in this book, describing the horrible acts of her older adopted brother, Jerome, and how she regularly renounced David to avoid being bullied at school. Teens might not have had the exact same experiences as Julia, but different parts of her story will ring true to them. She was sexually abused by her older brother, but could not report it because her younger brother would have been punished as well. Her struggle to love David unconditionally while dealing with the prejudices of small-town America and the horrors of their time in “jail” would be eye opening for many teens. They will see that every person can have a bad home life and bad experiences, but they can overcome these obstacles and succeed.I think most teens would enjoy reading this book. Julia’s descriptions of Escuela Caribe are frank and unapologetic and I think would appeal to teens. Reading excerpts from their time in this jail would be enough to pull in any reader. 4Q, 4P, J/S, A/YA
—Emily
