SPIDER IN A TREE is a revelation. Susan Stinson has wrought something wondrous in this book about the spiritual tribulations of a community of New England Calvinists. She brings their world to pulsing, sensuous life, entering as intimately into the mind of Jonathan Edwards, the original fire and brimstone preacher, as she does into the mind of Leah, who worked as his slave. Like Edwards, Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and radiantly human.

Alison Bechdel