I don’t want this story to be about only one way of viewing this family. I want to leave room for however many ways people view the characters. The ending had to be open in the same way. Whatever you believe about Miriam, I want the ending to be what you think she would do.

Set deep in the Bible Belt of the South, Monica West's "tender and wise" (Ann Patchett)debut novel Revival Season chronicles the young Miriam Horton’s awakening to her famous preacher father’s human limitations. What she witnesses shakes her to her core and upends the world that had existed before.  

Revival Season has been praised as a tenderly written and authentic dive into how faith molds Southern evangelical communities as well as families. West creates space for female characters to speak and wrestle with ideas of agency and power that are more commonly explored through male perspectives. 

“In “Revival Season,” her atmospheric, layered debut, Monica West probes that annual rite, when evangelicals are called to go forth and preach to all nations. West steeps her tale in a rich broth of religious ardor and personal betrayal… West creates a vivid, intimate world on the page, dramatizing the compromises evangelical women must make.”—New York Times 

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Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Monica West received her BA from Duke University, her MA from New York University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She was a Southern Methodist University Kimbilio Fellow in 2014, and she will be a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence in 2021. Revival Season is her first novel.