Fire & Brimstone

Chris Desmereaux—college graduate, churchgoer, and single mother—is struggling with poverty, coming to terms with her sexuality, and finding love—though she is unaware that her life will change, for better or worse, the day Gayle Evans finds her personal ad in the paper and answers it.

Gayle Evans, toe-tapping, knee-slapping, make-you-wanna-holla Minister of Music with a divine gift from God. "Praise the Lord" is her mantra. Macking women is her game. Destroying every life she touches, Gayle brings more misery than harmony. She has a lesson or two to learn after she uses her "relationship with God" to break up a seemingly happy home.

Alternately set in Washington, D.C. and Memphis, Tennessee, Fire & Brimstone is an "in your face" tale that explores lesbianism and black motherhood as both separate and integrated issues impacting the main character's role as a single parent, while opening dialogue on same-sex domestic violence, religious beliefs, bisexuality, negligent fathers, economics, and intra-racial caste systems among African Americans. Depending on one's beliefs and opinions, Fire & Brimstone leaves no room for "in-between" emotions, leading the reader to ultimately draw his or her own conclusion as to what the ending actually means: Is homosexuality a sin, or does God love us as we are?

The author reminds us that gay women are everywhere, even in the African American church—a place where no one expects to find them. Fire & Brimstone does an excellent job of testing the boundaries of 21st century morality.