The Land of Decoration: A Novel

Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2012: “In the beginning there was an empty room, a little bit of space, a little bit of light, a little bit of time.” Extraordinarily bright for her 10 years but isolated by her strange faith, Judith McPherson has always known she’s living in the End Times, anticipating a new life in “a land flowing with milk and honey.... the decoration of all lands.” Life with her widowed Father feels oppressively quiet, so out of candy wrappers and shoe laces and other cast-off stuff, she creates an intricate replica of her town in her room--one that lives by the rules of her internal logic--and makes the astonishing discovery that what she does in her bedroom’s Land of Decoration gives her miraculous abilities in this one. Egged on by the voice of God (or one more sinister), she expands her powers until real life teeters on a tenuous edge. A visceral and memorable depiction of an imaginative child trying to reconcile her idyllic interior life with a harsher world, Grace McCleen’s visionary debut grapples with essential questions: how to feel your way forward when faith blurs with madness, or grief cleaves a parent from their child, or our imagined sense of control cedes to life’s wondrous chaos. --Mari Malcolm