THE PLOT: ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ by Deesha Philyaw are short stories about Black women living in the U.S.A. There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife; the mother who bakes peach cobbler for her date with a married Pastor; and best friends in their forties who seek solace in each other’s arms while waiting to find husbands at prayer meetings. With stories that are somewhat interconnected, what truly binds these women are their secret loves and longings hiding behind their Christian faith.

RATING: This book is just as juicy as the peach on its cover. With themes about love and longing running through all of the stories, this collection is about masks we put on for the outside world vs. our internal lives. Expressed through the medium of “church ladies”, it’s less about religion and more about what is considered “proper” for a woman and the performance of female virtue. Each of the characters were beautiful and endearing in their vulnerability and I liked the experiments with form in ‘Dear Sister’, ‘Jael’ and ‘Instructions for Married Christian Husbands’. This is an extremely impressive debut and I am planning to re-read the stories to savour them even further.

GOOD BITS: It’s been a while since I read a short story collection but this book made me crave more of them. There’s something about dipping into a story and being able to get a picture of a whole life or snapshot of a character in only a few pages. It’s emotional and wholesome and intimate. It feels weird to say I loved all the characters but I found something to identify with each of them. All of the stories focussed on love, whether unrequited, familial or forbidden, and that vulnerability from each of the characters make them relatable and endearing.

NOT SO GOOD BITS: This isn’t a fair criticism but I wanted the stories to be more connected. I pre-ordered this book so long ago and it was so hyped in my mind, I had assumed that each of the protagonists would literally attend the same church and cross paths in each story. I guess I wanted to have a picture of their assumptions about each other as well as learning about each of their internal thoughts and feelings behind the scenes. I think this is a missed trick which could have capitalised on the veneer/outward persona vs. interior monologue theme.

OVERALL: I’d recommend this book to lovers of ‘Love in Colour’ by Bolu Babalola and ‘Who’s Loving You’ (collection edited by Sareeta Domingo). If you’re looking for a short story collection about love and women’s interiority, then please pick this up.

This book was published in paperback in the UK on 1^st June 2023 and is available to purchase with a discount on my bookshop.org profile.