Easter Everywhere is described by the author, Darcey Steinke as her spiritual memoir; A reflective piece of literature that describes her own personal quest to find God and to answer the age old questions surrounding spirituality.

Steinke, the daughter of a minister and grew up playing in her father’s rectories and the backwoods behind the church—performing her own baptisms, weddings and funerals on frogs, cats and dogs. Her mother, a former Miss Albany, grows increasingly depressed by the life of a minister’s wife and Steinke watches her parent’s relationship as it grows strained and distant. Her father’s own uncertainties surrounding his faith lead the family on a whirl-wind of moves from New York to Kentucky and numerous places in between. Steinke divides her memoir into five concise parts; each part representing a certain time and place in her life and her spiritually. The author takes the reader along with her on her journey from her stuttering childhood to her rebellious young adulthood, right up to the time she sat down to right her memoir from a profoundly reflective viewpoint. She introduces you to the animated characters she has met along her journey and lets her readers in on her own personal relations and anguishes over her own family’s instability and her questions surrounding her belief in God.

While I might not have picked this book off of a shelf at the local bookstore had it not been assigned for a college course in creative non-fiction writing that I was enrolled in, this piece far exceeded my expectations and it is a book that will become a permanent fixture in my own personal library. Whether you are a spiritual person or not, Steinke’s light-hearted language and humor set the scenes beautifully and provide a thought provoking backdrop for the reader. This piece of literature is unlike anything I have ever read before, but has a similar feel to it as Without a Map a memoir written by Meredith Hall, in that both authors are describing their zigzagging path to finding themselves; a path with no distinct directions on how to arrive at the end.

Easter Everywhere is unlike the traditional memoir in that it spans most of Steinke’s lifetime; from a young child to her adult life, rather than a small extracted piece of time in her life. Her memoir obviously does not focus on every aspect of her life during those years—in fact she never mentions her writing career during the memoir (even though during the time period she had written and published three novels all of which went on to become New York Times Notable Books of the Year), but instead she focuses on the events in her life that had a spiritual impact and explores them deeper as she searches in retrospect for the answers to her childhood question: “Why does God let bad stuff happen?”

As a young girl, Steinke sees a man in the middle of the road, dead. Big events like this an even the smaller more subtle moments are examined by the author as she considers God’s place in her world.

“The proximity of so much suffering made me start to suspect that God, in fact, was not infused into everything. God was hiding from me…I began to think in binaries, to dived the world into good places and bad places, heavens and hells. Heaven was the shady side of the house where the white violets grew, where I’d once seen a butterfly move inside a cocoon. Hell was the way the neighbor boy melted slugs in jars set in the sun. Heave was my parents’ bed. Hell was the garbage can under the kitchen sink” (Steinke 20).

As a reader, this memoir makes one take note of their own life and experiences surrounding religion and how it manifests itself in ones own life. This memoir allows the reader to be comfortable in their exploration of these notions. The tone the author takes reflects her own uncertainties, doubts and hesitance towards the spiritual life.

Easter Everywhere is a pleasure to read. Darcey Steinke has done an excellent job of opening up herself and her life to her audience and she brings the reader into this world that she is looking at through the window of time with poetic detail and expressive language. She lets her character be vulnerable to the scrutiny of the reader and seemingly hides no secrets from the reader. A memoir well worth the read!