THE LAYING ON OF HANDS

With its clarity and economy, Miller's debut about God-given gifts reads like a first-person parable, as 80-year-old Charlotte Tyler Preston looks back on her life. Known as Muchie while growing up in the 1910s, she lived on a rural Mississippi farm that was home to her parents, her nine siblings and her beloved grandmother, Tyler Mama ("I truly believed my grandmother had hung the moon"), from whom she inherited the gift of healing. Though slowed down occasionally by wooden, expository dialogue, the plot moves along apace, following Muchie as she grows up; falls in love; moves to Mobile, Ala.; marries and raises a family. Even as she deftly maneuvers the challenges faced by most African-American women in that era—poverty, racism, makeshift schools and even color discrimination within her own community—she has a tougher time making this so-called healing gift (which she never wanted) work at her bidding. She can turn a breech baby and magically reconnect the severed fingers of a sawmill employee, but she's helpless to save those she loves the most. Beginning with the untimely loss of Tyler Mama, whose injuries from a fall off a horse don't respond to Muchie's touch, to the death of her own beloved husband, Muchie feels betrayed by a God who appears to withhold this gift whenever she needs it most. She turns her back on her powers, but a valuable lesson from an unlikely source sets her right again in this uplifting tale about faith and acceptance. (May 4)