Dominion, a fictional town in the Mississippi Delta, is shot through with Black church culture and an outsize reverence for high-school football. At the turn of the millennium, it is a community in which sexuality flourishes despite, or perhaps because of, efforts to suppress it. Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, which takes its setting as its title, follows two women yoked together by their love for a teenager named Emanuel, who more commonly goes by “Wonderboy” or “Wonder”: Diamond, his girlfriend, and Priscilla, his mother and the “first lady” of the local church. Both women, over the course of the novel, desperately try to dislodge themselves from their difficult pasts while confronting a swelling sense of wickedness in Wonder.

Diamond has to grow up quickly when, at 8 years old, she i

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