Revival Season - Monica West

Monica West’s debut novel, Revival Season, is a classic coming-of-age story in which fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton comes to the realization that the world she has been living in is gone forever, and more importantly, that it had really never existed in the first place. Miriam may have been a naive teen at the beginning of Revival Season, but by the end of the book she is more an adult than her own parents may ever be again.

Miriam’s father is a Baptist preacher well known for his healing powers. Every summer, Reverend Horton packs up his whole family and heads east from their Texas home to hold a series of tent revivals throughout the Southeast. Revival season is an exciting time for the Horton children, an adventure they look forward to every year, and after the first revival goes so well, it looks like this is going to be the best revival season ever for their father. But it doesn’t turn out that way.

It all starts to go bad after a disastrous healing service during which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are loudly called into question by an old blind man. The way that the preacher reacts to being challenged, and the resulting violence that immediately follows, scares Miriam and makes her begin to question everything she thought she knew about her father. Now she has questions not only about Reverend Horton, but even about her faith, and the healings she has taken for granted for so long. But, within his family, Reverend Horton is a tyrant, a man who refuses to be challenged or questioned by his wife and children, a man quick to use the belt on his children for even the slightest violation of his principles. If Miriam is going to find answers, she will have to find them on her own.

And then it happens.

Miriam accidentally discovers that she may have her own healing powers despite the fact that both her father and her church have always made it very clear that God denies this kind of power to women. It is, of course, impossible to keep her newly discovered abilities completely secret, and over the next few months Miriam quietly, and privately, heals a handful of others. She knows that what she is doing could end up destroying her family and her church, and she is terrified by what her father will do when he learns what she has been up to. And now, at the beginning of a new revival season, she climbs with her brothers and sisters into their worn out old minivan knowing that she will have to decide between her family and her God before she ever sees Texas again. 

Bottom Line: Revival Season is a remarkable debut novel. Monica West is a good storyteller, and she creates here a believable family being forced to live within its own secretive world by a man who tolerates no questioning of his authority and power. Miriam Horton, though, is a young woman brave enough to think for herself; the question is whether she is also brave enough to defy her authoritative father. Revival Season ends in a way that lends itself to a sequel, and I’m hoping that happens because I would love to know what happens next to Miriam Horton and her family. 

Monica West