Potluck

You can love God and still hate how men use His name.

In 1987, Evelyn Bender is the perfect daughter of Mercy Falls—a small Midwestern town where submission is survival, and the communion plate weighs nothing while demanding everything. Married to a kind, oblivious husband and touched in private by a pastor who preaches holiness, Evelyn is drowning in the quiet certainty that the life everyone calls blessed is slowly killing her.

When a divorced librarian hands her The Feminine Mystique and whispers, "You can leave," Evelyn cracks. She leaves her husband, her church, and Mercy Falls with five-year-old Loraine and six hundred dollars.

Thirty-seven years later, Evelyn lives in a basement apartment, and her daughter hasn't spoken to her in fourteen months. When the funeral calls her back, she must face the women's circle that raised her, the pastor's hand that still haunts her, and the daughter she slapped when Loraine came out at nineteen.

Told in three voices—Evelyn in the 1980s, Evelyn in the present, and Loraine—this is a novel about the cost of belonging and the price of freedom.

Leaving isn't the same as losing. Staying isn't the same as winning. And silence is not always loneliness.

Potluck is for anyone who has ever left a church, been left by a mother, or sat in a parking lot at 2 a.m. praying to someone who might not be listening.