What makes a place home? For the women in Kelli Jo Ford’s debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, home is a complex, contentious thing. Their homes are comforting or harmful, safe or destructive, beloved or hated; sometimes, they are all these things at once.
In the book’s opening pages, Lula, a Cherokee woman and a devout member of the Beulah Springs Holiness Church, arrives home from her long day at work as a secretary and sits beside her 15-year-old daughter, Justine, on the porch of their small house. “Evenings like this make me wonder how a body would want to set their bones anywhere other than these hills,” Lula says, gazing out at the rolling landscape. Justine sees the same hills as “folds in a crumpled blanket,” and is very much able to imagine why someone would want to leave Sequoyah County in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Lula’s devoutness stifles Justine, who rebels against the Holiness Church’s rigid restrictions—modest clothing, a divestment from worldly things like the Rolling Stone magazines hidden in her closet, and a rejection of traditional medicine (“God healed what was meant to be healed”). Justine yearns to see something of the world, even if that something is only a trip to Six Flags with her estranged father, whose abandonment of the family seems to have pushed Lula toward strict religion in the first place.
Such cause-and-effect cycles are never spelled out too neatly by Ford, but doled out sporadically over the course of the book’s 13 chapters. For the most part, the book moves chronologically forward from its opening in the 1970s but focuses on different characters by switching between first- and third-person points-of-view. This makes the book feel expansive, peopled beyond the bounds of the women threading the main narrative together. Ford’s characters are independent and self-aware throughout, even as their actions illustrate how trauma and pain can be passed down through families.
