Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer's Fellow Addie E. Citchens commands a prodigious talent, and her debut novel, Dominion, is a barnstormer of an opening act. With strong characterization and pacing, Dominion introduces the Winfrey family and the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, headed by the Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., and his dutiful wife, Priscilla. While Sabre holds sway over his Mississippi community, it is his youngest, Emanuel (called Manny, Wonderboy, or just Wonder), who claims the novel's spotlight, but neither of these men get to tell this story.
After opening each chapter with a church bulletin insert for taking sermon notes, Citchens gives the story over to Priscilla and Diamond, the girl Wonder has been dating. Priscilla's view of her husband has changed over the years: "Then, I thought we were in this together; it took a long while and a harsh fall to see it had never been about us, but about him." Diamond, by contrast, can see nothing but good in Wonder. Diamond thrills at how safe she feels when he disagrees with the way his father hits his mother: "you shouldn't have to hit your woman at all. The threat of you should be enough." The threat of Wonder makes itself known in halting revelations, often through the mysterious numbered sections at the close of each chapter. As the mysteries come clear, the Winfrey family starts to disintegrate (so, too, the tidy structure of the chapters), and readers will stand with Priscilla and Diamond as they face down the dominion that has been holding them back. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian