Fire & Brimstone — Laurinda Brown

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.