Mia McKenzie's These Heathens recounts one formative weekend in the life of Doris Steele, a pregnant teenager with no desire to become a parent at such a young age. "I thought about God's will. I thought about my own. And I decided. I have to get rid of it." But deciding is different than doing, and options are limited for a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in 1960, so Doris turns to a onetime teacher for help. When Mrs. Lucas takes her to Atlanta for a weekend procedure, Doris expects to return home a changed woman: pregnant one moment, not the next. Instead, she spends a weekend surrounded by folks whom her small-town, religious upbringing insisted could not exist: feminists, activists, queer people, atheists. "I didn't know anybody who didn't talk about life like it was small, its possibilities limited to whatever they, themselves, could imagine," Doris reflects. But just two days in Atlanta open her eyes to the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, women's liberation, and all the possibilities of a life well lived.
McKenzie (Skye Falling) has crafted Doris's story with care, bringing readers along as Doris discovers a world beyond the confines of the small town that raised her "on shame, gorged and fattened on it, like all the girls around [her]." Expertly incorporating historical events into the imagined life of a young woman exploring a world of choice instead of expectation, These Heathens is a powerful novel that speaks to the real and perceived limitations placed on women--particularly young Black women--in the past and into the present moment. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer