Julia Watts: 10 books

**Set in rural Tennessee, QUIVER, a YA novel by Julia Watts, focuses on the unlikely friendship between two teens from opposite sides of the culture wars. ** Libby is the oldest child of six, going on seven, in a family that adheres to the "quiverfull" lifestyle: strict evangelical Christians...

Rabbinic tales of drought, disaster, and charismatic holy men illuminate critical questions about power, ethics, and ecology in Jewish late antiquity. Through a sustained reading of the Babylonian Talmud's tractate on fasts in response to drought, this book shows how Bavli Taʿanit challenges Deuteronomy's...

In Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, Julia Watts Belser examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Judea. Faced with stories of sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, Belser argues, our readings of rabbinic narrative must wrestle with the brutal body...

Vermillion, Georgia, is the small town that time forgot, or at least that’s how it feels to fifteen-year-old Rufus. As if being a scrawny ginger called “Matchstick” isn’t bad enough, Rufus is also gay, an artist, and the son of conservative religious fanatics. He doesn’t have a prayer of...

Abandoned by her mother and raised by her loving but religiously zealous grandmother, 16-year-old Heavenly Faith Simms (H.F. for short) has never felt like she belonged anywhere. \r\nWhen she finds her mother's address in a drawer, she and her best friend, Bo, an emotionally repressed gay boy, hit the...

This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in order to unsettle—or “queer”—the discourses of “religion” and “science,” and, by extension, the “science and religion discourse.” Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential theorists such as Michel...

Twelve-year-old Miranda Jasper has the Sight, a gift that allows her to see into other people's thoughts. Most regular kids are scared of Miranda and avoid her; however, Miranda does have two friends who definitely aren't regular kids: horror-movie obsessed Adam who has moved to Wilder from the big...

1944. When sixteen-year-old Ruby Pickett and her family move to the new, government-built city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Ruby knows that her daddy’s new job will help the war effort, but she has no idea how. Ruby is not alone in her lack of knowledge, as the city’s true purpose is a carefully guarded...

Miranda Jasper just wants her life to go back to normal. For Miranda, "normal" means living in a spooky old house in tiny Wilder, Kentucky, with her mom and granny who, like her, share a mysterious power called The Sight. It also means hanging out with her two best friends, Adam, a city...

Miranda Jasper is different from the other kids in the small town of Wilder, Kentucky. Like all the women in her family, she has the Sight the ability to see into other people's thoughts.Though her granny assures Miranda that the Sight is a gift, it often feels like a curse especially when Miranda's...