Eden is a fearless and wildly original debut that explodes on the first page and sustains a tight rope intensity until the last. When 14-year-old Maddy Dangerfield draws a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in fire-engine, red lipstick during Sunday school, the rural black community of Pyke County, Mississippi, is scandalized. Her mother, mortified by the small town, gossip and determined to teach Maddy, the perils of her youth intelligence, forces her to spend weekends, caring for her estranged Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the wrong side of town and is dying of cancer. The lessons Maddie learns there are ones that could not be taught in any church.