Dodging Prayers and Bullets

by Karen Beatty

A young girl prevails over poverty and religious bigotry to survive childhood abduction, a predatory theologian, family secrets, and the drug culture of the 1960s.

In an Appalachian Mountain town during the early 1950s, guns and domestic abuse are as prevalent as prayer meetings and dubiously ordained preachers. Young Skyla Fay Jenkins is often forced to choose between what’s labeled “righteous” and what she knows to be right. When her family moves up north to an urban setting, she struggles to overcome the social and gender limitations of the late 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, a chance encounter with a childhood nemesis prompts her to revisit the abiding love and playful river romps of her youth, along with a traumatic abduction and family violence.

This fictional story celebrates the ability of a child to survive and thrive, despite those who would do her harm and the failed intentions of those who would protect her. It also explores decades of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, from the perspective of an evolving free-spirited female.

333 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 6, 2023

Reviews

[David Rubin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished Karen Beatty's "Dodging Prayers and Bullets". The book is a fictionalized biography that is a very satisfying read of a woman's youth, coming of age, and maturity. It spans her life from the poverty of rural Kentucky through her local schooling, her university studies, to her life in New York City. The story is as much about the main character's relationships with her family and friends as about the locations in which she lived. Haight-Ashbury and the Berkeley campus couldn't be more different human habitats than the holler in Kentucky where she grew up. Watch for her take of Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again".

[Sandee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Dodging Prayers and Bullets is like sitting in a dark theater watching a colorful, attention-grabbing movie unfold before you. The pictures, sounds and settings are vivid. The dialogue is genuine, and the story is dramatic from first page to last.

Author Karen Beatty creates this immediacy by daring to write in the present tense and first person about a 38-year-old woman’s fascinating history in the present tense and first person. The reader is right up close to Skyla Fay Jenkins as she experiences change after change, from the back woods of Kentucky to New York City and from a one-room schoolhouse to University of California at Berkley at the height of the anti-war, flower-power era in the 1960s.

Beatty portrays the people around Skyla vividly, their unique ways of speaking and living in the various cultures and relationships to her and others make them seem as alive as Skyla herself.

Dodging Prayers and Bullets does a fabulous favor for readers in capturing very different places, people, and cultures in the US in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. Everyone who lived then or knows anyone who did should read this wonderful, powerful novel relating one woman’s journey and growth.

—Sandra Storey, author, Every State Has Its Own Light

[Karline Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always loved Karen Beatty's writing, and "Dodging Prayers and Bullets" especially resonates with me. Skyla's eventual success in leaving her family's rural, religious environment and navigating the tumultuous 60's culture of U.C. Berkeley magnifies my own experience of leaving small town Sweet Home and broadening my life at the University of Oregon.
Karline F. Bird

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[L.A. Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

My goodness (Or "Lordy, Lordy") this poor woman has been through hell at first, but rises above it and goes down an experimental path without falling off it. Good notations on the '60's and '70's history and how it affected her personally. Excellent book.