I KNOW JESUS CHRIST IS REAL

A Christian woman examines her faith in this memoir.

At the beginning of her book, Deir-Boyette recalls living a settled and seemingly satisfying life in Jamaica: “I had a job with the Jamaican government, a newly built house in a gated community, and a payment-free Honda Accord.” But she wasn’t sure how she would pay for her son’s college tuition or what exactly she should do next when suddenly she had a religious experience. She recalls that Jesus told her to move to the United States. “I was not going to let others’ negative comments deter me,” she writes. “I trusted God, and my faith was reactivated.” The work consists of the author’s recounting of various incidents in her life in Jamaica and also in America with her husband and sons. The thread she winds throughout the narrative traces the ubiquitous, revelatory presence of her faith in day-to-day life. Readers of Christian memoirs will know much of what to expect from such a narrative, and Deir-Boyette doesn’t disappoint. Her personal involvement in her own faith is uniformly dramatic, and the general lessons she draws from specific events are always upbeat. More skeptical readers will notice that she virtually always ascribes divine causation to things that have obvious real-world reasons. A few months before her son started university in North Carolina, for instance, legislation lowered the tuition—the author calls it “God’s grace.” Deir-Boyette worked hard and eventually got a corner office and a new car, asserting, “Who but God? Hallelujah!” At one point, when the author told some neighbors that she regularly heard God’s voice, they responded that her story was “too weird,” and some of her skeptical readers might agree. But Deir-Boyette’s insistence throughout that her faith is a living thing and that Jesus walks with her every day are sentiments that many of her fellow fundamentalist Christians will share.

A passionate, if familiar, Christian account.