Christine Pountney’s third novel attempts much more than most novels can handle. Thankfully, the author acquits herself with aplomb. The book’s three main characters ask life’s proverbial “big questions” without seeming precious or sentimental, and they all come across as fully realized, flawed, and fascinating human beings. 

Sweet Jesus focuses on three siblings, each of whom is at a crossroads. Hannah is deeply in love, but her boyfriend refuses to have a child. Connie’s husband has declared bankruptcy and didn’t tell her until the house was repossessed. Their adopted brother, Zeus, grieving the loss of his boyfriend, is desperate to reconnect with his birth parents, who lost custody of him as a child. Together, Hannah, Connie, and Zeus rent a pickup truck and embark on a road trip to the place where their evangelical mother once had a spiritual revelation that changed her life.

Pountney’s story poses several questions about the role organized religion plays for both the individual and society, and the impact of how various choices – in particular the choice to be a parent – can lay the groundwork for both happiness and failure. Pountney doesn’t stoop to poking fun at religion; instead she looks at the nature of belief from various angles, and treats her characters’ quests for spiritual insight with respect. Connie’s devotion to Jesus doesn’t render her simple or one-dimensional; neither does Hannah’s hostility to Christianity or Zeus’s painful memories of how religion can be used to justify immoral acts.

The journey culminates at a fundamentalist megachurch in Kansas, where the three siblings confront their various demons in unexpected and humbling ways. Sweet Jesus is both a meditative journey and a swirling emotional ride. The characters come to life so wonderfully that they linger in the reader’s consciousness. Pountney takes on big themes – grief, god, failure, sex – with a skilful, offbeat touch, and the result is highly laudable.