In my April newsletter, I release some new advance praise for The Devoted, and talk about Easter and its inspiration for The Devoted. You can subscribe here, or read an excerpt below:
Happy Easter and Passover, readers! This month I’m thinking about the holiday that formed such a strong part of my childhood memories, and how I decided to frame The Devoted as a story that stretched from Christmas to Easter, as a story about birth and re-birth. For the non-practicing quasi-Christians out there, maybe you went to church only on those two days out of the year — but that was enough to mean something, to shape your identity in some small way. The Devoted is about those small rituals that give us a sense of identity and bind us to our community; and it’s also about what we choose to take and what we choose to leave behind when we set out on our own paths.
New advance praise for the book:
I’m so grateful to the early readers of The Devoted, and happy to release new blurbs from them:
“The Devoted is a beautifully written story of the seductions of faith, its many desperations both light and dark. A most absorbing and psychologically astute novel that announces Blair Hurley as a brave new talent.”
– Chang-rae Lee, author of The Surrendered