Hell as Well
Fourteen-year-old Evalynn Mae has only ever known her father's sermons and her mother's punishments. In their strict religious household, obedience is demanded, love is conditional, and sin is punished with fire. When her secret feelings for her best friend are exposed, Evalynn becomes the center of her family's shame-isolated, controlled, and made to believe she's broken.
Her only light is Brennan, her younger brother, whose small hand in hers gives her the strength to endure. But when the state intervenes, Evalynn is ripped from the only home she's ever known and placed into foster care. Instead of freedom, she finds herself under the suffocating rule of the Carters, whose "perfect family" fa ade hides cruelty masked as kindness. She's told when to sleep, when to eat, and even how to wash the skin she was born in. Each protest is met with dismissal, each cry for help swallowed by silence.
As her new social worker investigates the past that Evalynn is too afraid to speak aloud, her parents are arrested, Brennan is kept from her, and her lifeline-Officer Jules McGillicutty-stops answering her calls. Evalynn spirals between desperation and numb obedience, caught in a world where every adult insists they know what's best for her, while her own voice is dismissed as hysteria.
Haunted by the weight of her parents' faith, the terror of her foster home, and the guilt of believing she's betrayed her family, Evalynn faces an impossible choice: stay silent and fade into the porcelain doll Mrs. Carter demands her to be-or risk everything by fighting for her truth, her brother, and herself.
Raw, unflinching, and deeply moving, this is the story of a queer child navigating faith, control, and survival-where even broken wings can find a way to fly.
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