Book Review: Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

I read this book hesitantly. In fact, it sat in my "to read" stack for several months before I decided to swallow hard and open it up. Since I am an adoptive parent, and our family is transracial, I wasn't anxious to read the story of what some might consider "a transracial adoption gone bad." The story is about a brother and sister, one child adopted, the other biological. Scheeres writes with candid honesty about the relationship between her and David, one of two African American boys her fundamentalist Christian parents adopted in the early 1970s when David was three years old. The description of her parents as fundamentalist Christians is not simply a dismissive point of reference, but an important part of this story since the reason Scheeres gives for their adoption decision is to show that they were color-blind Christians they were. The only problem is they weren't. Color-blind that is; I can't speak as to whether they were born again, but if actions are any evidence of such then I might be able to make a judgment. David, and their other adopted son, Jerome, lived in the basement of the family home, and were repeatedly beaten, ignored, berated and treated as if they had crashed in on some grim family party. The strangely comforting thing about this story is that Scheeres' parents seemed detached and resentful of all their children, including Scheeres and her three biological siblings. So perhaps this is less a story of adoption gone bad, then it is a heartbreaking story of parenting gone bad.
Scheeres, it seems, is the only person who seemed to truly love David, despite her own confusion about race and place within the family structure. With no one to guide her, she vacillates between loving her brother with abandon and protectiveness, and being ashamed of him and wishing that she had a "normal" family. Through the horrors of family life in the Scheeres' home, and then being shuffled to a Christian boarding (boot camp) school in the Dominican Republic, the love between this brother and sister wins out, although the story has no happy ending. I was left with both a feeling of hopelessness, and hope - if that's possible. It is the same feeling I have toward the ugliness of racism in our world: hopelessness that perhaps it will never change, and that we may never get to a place where we see beyond skin color, and hope that enough people will care enough to make it happen. If someone like Scheeres can do this with everything against her, then there is hope for the rest of us.