Selah's Bed by Jenoyne Adams is a gutteral, slow, and disturbing book. Her writing style is interesting, if you can get past the disturbing story line. "Sex was a way to stop the crying, the powerlessness of not feeling beautiful..."
The book reads in a choppy, every other chapter way, meaning that one chapter tells of her life now and the next revisits her childhood. Two threads twist together by the end to help you know Selah in all her complexities, but it's far too troubling by the end of the book to even care!
Abandoned by her mother, and raised by a pill-popping grandmother, Selah consistently cheats on her minister-husband, somehow finding comfort or power in wielding sex. Childhood chapters reveal she charged boys a quarter to feel her up (and charged more to do other things) when she was just in grade school. Selah also writes letters to a child one would think she lost in late pregnancy or as an infant, however, we find out in the end, she has been referring to a fetus she electively aborted when she was a teenager (her now minister husband was the father). The ending is just WAY too trite...
~Robin
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