Child of God Book

In this searing novel, bestselling author Lolita Files tells the tale of a Southern family torn apart by the secrets it struggles to keep.

Everybody knows everybody else's business in Downtown, Tennessee. Neighbors while away afternoons at the local bar, swapping rumors about voodoo, incest, and illegitimate children. Usually they're gossiping about the Botens.

In this epic saga, Lolita Files unveils the hidden lives of three generations of the Boten clan, a family as cursed by fate as they are blessed with hope. There's Grandma Amalie, who's willing to sacrifice everything for her son; there's Grace, who manages to conceal the identity of her child's father for more than twenty years; there's Aunt Sukie, whose strange power over her husband, Walter, is matched only by the strength of her dark magic; and, finally, there's Lay, whose secret betrayals will set the Boten clan in motion, sending its members on a quest for self-discovery that will lead them from one end of the world to the other.

Publishers Weekly

From the author of Scenes from a Sistah comes this saga of a family cast about by the winds of fate and torn apart by love and fear. Entwining the stories of two generations of the Boten clan of Downtown, Tenn., Files has created a lurid play of murder, incest, rape and deceit worthy of the Shakespearean names of her characters. She references Hamlet, but this spectacle might find a better comparison in Titus Andronicus. Ophelia Boten is the product of an incestuous union between her mother, Grace, and her latently homosexual uncle, Walter. Unaware of her own origins or the tragedies of her family's past, Ophelia is soon pregnant with a love child of her own, courtesy of her vicious older brother, Lay (short for Laertes). Lay is sent off to Detroit, where he becomes a heroin dealer, and their infant son Hamlet perishes in a fire that may or may not have been started deliberately by Sukie, Walter's voodoo witch of a wife. Unsurprisingly, the family unravels even further, and the narrative eventually degenerates into more murders, fires, addictions, rapes and just about everything else under the sun. Files's writing is serviceable, but fails to lift this soap opera up to a truly moving level, leaving the flat characters to carry out the Herculean task of transforming the overblown drama into something real and poignant. Throughout it all, Files harps on the power of love, both driving the characters further into self-destruction and bringing some eventual redemption but the plot is too unwieldy and the brushstrokes too broad for this tragedy to escape predictability and garishness. Agent, Warren Frazier of John Hawkins Assoc.; 7-city author tour. (Aug. 14) Copyright 2001 Cahners BusinessInformation.