Our October Book Pick Is ‘Dominion,’ a Novel About Power & Pain in a Southern Black Community

Debut author Addie E. Citchens’ tone and word choice can be quite playful, despite the heavy topics at play.

By Nora Biette-Timmons | October 8, 2025 | 3:32pm

Photo: iStockphoto Books Entertainment

Our October Book Pick Is ‘Dominion,’ a Novel About Power & Pain in a Southern Black Community

Dominion, the debut novel from Addie E. Citchens, takes its title most obviously from its setting: the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, a small town where the prominent Winfrey family holds a preeminent social and spiritual position in the Black community. But the title also has another meaning, because this is a novel about degrees of power and privilege, and who is permitted dominion over whom.

The Winfrey men are given dominion over basically anything they want or can take. Sabre, the patriarch, is the lead pastor at Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church; he is respected and revered; writes weekly treatises for his congregants under the header “I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody who can save anybody”; and has affairs he doesn’t seem at all interested in keeping quiet.

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His five children, all boys, are nearly all grown and pursuing promising careers, save for Emanuel (aka Manny aka Wonderboy), the Winfreys’ youngest and most charismatic child, who is finishing up his junior year in high school when the novel begins.

These men, though central to the events of the novel, are not its narrators; the story is told primarily in turns from the first-person perspectives of Priscilla, the boys’ mother and Sabre’s long-suffering wife (the phrase is clichéd, but man oh man is it true in this context), and Diamond, a local teenage girl from a tough background.

Diamond does not really believe in God but attends the Seven Seals religiously so she can watch Manny play bass in the church band. Manny takes an interest in her and the two begin dating; to Diamond, this is some stroke of luck; from our perspective as readers, it’s clear that something a bit more nefarious may be at play, though how conscious or even intentional Manny’s motivations are remains unclear throughout the book. He is going through some sort of mental and emotional darkness, and seeks to ignore it by taking what he believes is his. In Diamond’s case, it is always willingly given, but each chapter ends with a snippet from the perspective of a third-person narrator perpetrating sexual assaults. Though these are written anonymously, you soon realize that it’s Manny, and the sneaking suspicion you had that he is deeply troubled is confirmed.

Despite the heavy topics at play, Citchens’ tone and word choice can be quite playful. “I wanted it to have a certain cadence, I wanted it to have a certain rhythm,” Citchens said of Dominion on a podcast recently. And the way she describes women observing (and often judging) other women is delicious.

Her sentences contain layers of information, giving glimpses into the past and these characters’ relationships, or hinting at developments beyond each narrator’s knowledge. For example, it’s so clear each time Diamond runs into her older brother, Yancey, that he’s becoming more and more entrenched in Dominion’s drug and gang scene, but she remains too hopeful to see it.

Occasionally, Diamond’s narration risks being too credulous; “only I knew this big boy-man was broken, and he just had to let whatever it was out of his system,” she thinks as she watches a tear forming in Manny’s eyes as he’s touching himself before they hook up. But despite what she’s experienced—attempting to live in a motel and avoid foster care after her mother abandoned her, Yancey, and their two other siblings—she’s landed with an aunt-like figure, and has had a fairly comfortable life for the past few years. Instead of hardening her, Diamond’s tough start has left her desperate for love, which presents as naivete.

Priscilla is the opposite—or perhaps merely what happens after being with someone like Sabre for two decades. She takes whiskey shots in her closet and pills (“fulfillments,” as she calls them) when she gets too anxious or stressed thinking about her life as a mother and wife. She had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, and occasionally questions her own perceptions; she wonders if she can really trust the darkness she’s seeing in her son—and whether she is responsible.

The narrative shifts after a somewhat shocking act of violence. It remains a secret, though its reverberations have consequences on Diamond and Manny’s relationship, and she begins senior year heartbroken and deeply confused.

Manny has transferred to the local private high school, and it seems he might end up going scot-free out into the world, as Priscilla worries about how many more young women he might hurt in college. That is, until yet another violent assertion of dominion reminds us that this is not only the United States, but the American South, and the threat of racism is never far away.

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