"The Land of Decoration," by Grace McCleen Illustration by André da Loba "There is a world in my room," says Judith McPherson, the mother­less 10-year-old narrator of Grace McCleen's first novel, "The Land of Decoration." It is made from things no one else wanted and it is made with things that were my mother's, that she left to me. The world is Judith's miniature re‑creation of the land of milk and honey that she believes will come after Armageddon. Touchingly, it is just a cleaned-up version of her working-class neighborhood, comprising tiny gardens and snowmen and clay model figures on which she eventually enacts a shameful voodoo. It's no wonder Judith spends all day in her room. She is abnormally isolated - constrained by her father's religious fundamentalism, which dictates that she sit out school assemblies and accept as her social circle the motley members of her church group, with whom she wanders through town trying to evangelize. Judith considers all of this within the range of normal. Only when she becomes the target of the class bully does the imminence of the End seem personal, and acute. Judith's school is an unsupervised wasteland. Her addled teacher allows her to be mocked, shoved and otherwise physically abused. When the bully threatens to drown Judith in a school toilet, we fully believe he will. This is when her Land of Decoration begins to matter. Judith ornaments the miniature world with cotton and prays for snow. Snow comes - a biblical amount of it. The success of Judith's first miracle sets off a series of domino miracles, all of which occur under the novel's slow-­gathering and persuasive examination of a child's crisis of faith. Unable to involve her harried father in her problems, as he is being persecuted for his position on the local factory strike, Judith summons what she believes is the voice of God. As "God" continues to advise Judith, he is revealed as a scamp, maybe even the Devil, and the dialogues between Judith and God offer such botched versions of supplication that they give a whole new meaning to the concept of unanswered prayer. This novel builds interesting uncertainties into its narrative: Is Judith capable of dark magic, or are the events in her life coincidence? Is the wrathful voice inside her somewhere in the realm of imaginary friendship, or is she schizophrenic? McCleen never tips her hat. The writing is born of a genuine inquiry into the nature of religious belief, especially as it relates to one's psychological development. We know that children are uncomfortable with ambiguity, but so are they, as this novel suggests, uncomfortable with the biblical literalism maintaining that the End really will come, and that all of their neighbors and teachers will be washed away or burned because they did not believe. "The Land of Decoration" puts a child at the crux of this interpretive dilemma, and our hearts go out to her. Although "The Land of Decoration" is philosophically sophisticated, it is still narrated by a 10-year-old girl. And although a 10-year-old girl may have much to teach the world, some things are beyond her purview, and some language beyond her limits. One character smells like "wee," and in the factory, we are told, "they make steel for things that fly." I occasionally wished for a narrator less childlike and disingenuous in such recognizable ways. When McCleen lets Judith's voice borrow from the Scripture that influences her, or from the girlish "how to" lists that appear throughout in lovely, secular juxtaposition, the writing is elliptical and stirring. I won't reveal here whether Judith's misery is relieved, because part of the achievement of this gripping novel is the sustained way in which we are made to watch and root for our motherless under­dog. If childhood is a crucible, so is, at times, reading an unvarnished book about one attempt to survive it. Amity Gaige's third novel, "Schroder," will be published in February.