Sometimes a character comes along who is so bad she's finger-licking good. Meet Camille, the star of Michelle Stimpson's Falling into Grace. Camille lies like a rug. She makes up a fictional dying cat to shirk work duties and pretends to have a pacemaker to garner sympathy. She insists she's accepted Jesus Christ as her savior, but only so she can secretly record herself singing with a church choir and submit a demo tape to her agent.
See, Camille is broke. In the early 1990s, she had fame and beaucoup bucks as part of an all-girl pop group, but after her disastrous firing of her savvy and protective brother/manager, she hasn't seen cash money (or her hurt brother) since. It turns out the joke is on Camille, though. Ever since she accepted Jesus into her life as part of her ruse to make a comeback, she finds herself, well, acting Christ-like. She's volunteering with the church's teenage girls, making friendships and maybe even falling for her earnest choir director.
Falling into Grace is a story about faith--faith in God and God's unwavering faith in us. The brilliance of Stimpson's story is that Camille could be any one of us on our worst day. You know she's going to get her comeuppance, but you still root for her ultimate redemption. And there is something infinitely human about a protagonist who can cattily make fun of someone's shoes while still asking, in all seriousness, what Jesus would do. --Natalie Papailiou. author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend