In this warmhearted memoir, a woman looks back on an Appalachian girlhood colored by the tug of war between her fundamentalist religion and her yearning for glamor.

Hatton recaps her early years growing up in 1960s Jackson County, Kentucky, in a working-class family—her father worked in a rubber factory, her mother was a housewife—and the pious congregation of the Big Hill Free Pentecostal Holiness Church. Much of the book covers ordinary events in a child’s life at the time: the author’s first day at school and her separation anxiety giving way to joy at her first reading lesson; a stint in the hospital with rheumatic fever that left her with a heart murmur; processing the assassination of President Kennedy, which some in her family mourned and others viewed with grim satisfaction because of his suspect Catholicism; and family rituals, from the yearly slaughtering of pigs to the weekly oyster stew feast. Hatton also profiles her enormous extended family, including her philandering grandpa, who died in a car crash beside a woman who was not his wife. She steeps readers in her church meetings, which featured energetic hymns and dancing, speaking in tongues, and prophesying whenever the spirit moved worshippers. The congregation was a straight-laced group that called themselves the Saints, strictly adhered to the “King James Virgin” of the Bible, as one member called it, and prohibited drinking, smoking, fancy clothes, and putting on airs. This troubled Hatton because she daydreamed about growing up to marry a rich man, live in a mansion, and wear the latest fashions and jewelry, like her idol Jackie Kennedy—an ambition that moved her to shoplift a forbidden lipstick from a dime store.

Hatton’s reminiscences paint an engrossing panorama of tightknit communities that embraced but also confined people. Her writing is wittily alive to class tensions—her mother used the term “Higher-Ups” to denote those with the money and status to look down on them—and the mordantly humorous mark they leave on hillbilly self-awareness. Her Pentecostal church is the antithesis of the Higher-Ups culture of hierarchy and decorum, thriving instead on the self-taught religiosity of its blue-collar pastors and the wild enthusiasms of their flock, which Hatton captures with an electrifying immediacy (“When the Holy Ghost came over him, Brother Junior’s dancing was potentially dangerous to anything in his path….[He] sailed over two rows of seats as effortlessly as a whitetail deer clearing a fence…and sprinted back and forth down the center aisle, pumping his fists above his head as he hollered, ‘Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!’”). This material could have turned into kitsch, but Hatton avoids that by plumbing the complex inner lives of her relatives in evocative prose that teases out conflicted personalities and dark familial antagonisms in sharp detail. (Hatton writes of her Aunt Edythe’s nervous breakdown: “She muttered to herself and seemed frustrated by what she heard. Mommy tried brightly and a little too loudly to engage her in the women’s brave and desperate conversation. Aunt Edythe briefly made eye contact with her, silently communicating such intense annoyance and hatred that Mommy was unnerved.”) The result is a colorful, touching recreation of small-town life.

A luminous, richly textured portrait of family and faith, beautifully written and vividly remembered.