Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood

Frequently caricatured as the religion that rejects medical treatment, Christian Science gets a balanced, nuanced appraisal in this memoir by a writer who grew up within the faith. Barbara Wilson appreciates Christian Science's unusual openness to women, who gained self-respect and status as its practitioners and healers, but she bares its inadequacies in a wrenching account of her mother's battle with cancer, suicide attempt, and eventual death. Her precise, unsentimental prose delineates a decades-long journey toward self-knowledge and peace with her past: it's a very American saga, sensitively told.