Alison Wisdom’s The Burning Season isn’t your typical story about a cult...Technically, the Church of Dawes at the center of her story isn’t a cult per se—but there’s very little daylight between the fundamentalist Christian group at the center of this novel and the concept of cults as we understand them...Yet, what makes Wisdom’s book so compelling is the deft way it explores this unique setting and characters without judging them or mocking their circumstances...Yes, the story unflinchingly portrays the dangerous and misogynistic elements at work in the larger group, but it is also sympathetic to the experiences of the people who have been taken in by the promises of its leaders...The story follows Rosemary, a young woman who, desperate to save her marriage, moves with her husband Paul to a tiny town in Texas and joins an ultraconservative Christian sect run by a man named Papa Jake...The uber-controlling community forbids women from even sitting next to men during church services and of course, they aren’t allowed access to things like cars, phones, or social media apps...And Rosemary, a liberal feminist who loves day drinking and Instagram, goes along with it, initially throwing herself into this almost completely alien life out of guilt over her own infidelity...Two years later, she is deeply unhappy, fudging the dates on her period tracker and questioning where she belongs.

The Burning Season, the second novel from Alison Wisdom, is a mesmerizing and eerie portrait of faith, marriage and desire...For as long as Rosemary can remember, she's always wanted more, which is the only way she can explain what drives her to keep cheating on Paul, her beloved husband and well-established 'good guy'...Desperate for his forgiveness, Rosemary agrees to follow him to an ultraconservative Christian sect in Texas where men like Paul and pastor Papa Jake always have the last word...But as fires begin to ravage the area and Rosemary doesn't become pregnant with the child Paul so desperately wants, tensions within her marriage, her community and herself escalate fast...While Paul's tendency to both charm and unnerve works as an apt metaphor for the appeal of religious fanaticism, it is an even better portrait of the subtle power relations and the pleasure of submission in a marriage.

Faith, guilt, and sacrifice play into the quietly distressing latest from Wisdom...Rosemary, 32, deals with her stifling new life in tiny Dawes, Tex...She moved there with her husband, Paul, two years earlier to join an ultraconservative Christian sect run by Papa Jake...Rosemary agreed to the plan after she was caught cheating, and now she fudges her fertility tracking to avoid getting pregnant...At their church, women are forbidden from speaking to men, nor are they allowed to use phones or cars...The plot thickens as Rosemary contends with her new role as a mother as well as the arrival of a stranger in town, all of which makes her question her faith, and meanwhile the townspeople’s animosity toward the church escalates into vandalism...Wisdom turns this into an entrancing conflagration.