“Tender and intelligent”
“Zoltan’s lovely debut offers glimpses into the spiritual self-care we can find for ourselves in literature….The scope of the book expands and contracts, touching on large-scale questions relating to faith and wonder, as well as on specific embodied experiences, which Zoltan shares in visceral, beautiful ways.”
- Starred review in Library Journal
”In these soaring, open-hearted essays, Vanessa Zoltan writes with fierce brilliance about suffering, survival, and the kind of meaning in life that can withstand real scrutiny.”
-John Green, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed
"As an atheist, I’ve hungered for these sermons. As I reader, I’ve longed for this exegesis. This is a book about much more than how to secularly pray, and much more than how to read reverently. It is a book about how to be. And it is told through the wondrous earthly companionship of not just Jane Eyre, but the miraculous Vanessa Zoltan.” — Lauren Sandler, author of This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement
Lauren Sandler, author of This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement
How does one create a life of meaning-- not merely a sense of purpose, but a ritual and a practice to give that purpose structure and power-- when traditional religion feels untenable? Vanessa Zoltan destroys the boundaries between ethics and aesthetics with a radical and beautiful idea, one that will ring true to every passionate reader: that intentional reading can empower and shape our lives. More than a love letter to the power of books, more than a reinterpreting of religious practice, and much more than a reading of Jane Eyre, Praying with Jane Eyre invites us, in Zoltan's accessible voice, into an intimacy with the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, and shows us how literature can sanctify them.
-- Dara Horn, author of Eternal Life and People Love Dead Jews
"I love this book for its audacity to call a romance novel sacred. I love this book for its humor and humility. I love this book for both its reverence and irreverence. “Praying with Jane Eyre” is literary, spiritual, and autobiographical, at once. This is a book committed to the truths of things -- from the holocaust to personal betrayal -- no matter how hard those truths may be.
Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
Praying with Jane Eyre is a readable, huggable guide to better living, and loving, through literature—not to mention the most affectionate portrait of grandparents that I have read in ages. And doses of Jay Gatsby and Harry Potter, besides. Who can resist?
Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood