“To be a Christian is to believe the world you see is not the true world,” writes J.J. Martin in his haunting debut novel, Father Sweet. His protagonist is an unnamed boy growing up in the Catholic community of Blackburn Hamlet, near Ottawa, Ontario, in the late 1970s:

Even as a twelve-year-old, I knew there was what you could figure out from what you saw, and the interpretation the adults wanted. I was immersed in a big charade. The true world thrived invisibly all around me, foaming with terrific power. Agents of evil posed in friendly guises. Ghosts floated behind my back. My thoughts were broadcast to angels and demons. I was never alone, I was observed at all times, and my thoughts notated and reported up to Jesus or the Heavenly Father. Although I might not see any consequence of any action or thought, it was there, nonetheless. Like an oil stain on a dress shirt. Fortunately, it can be taken out when laundry’s done for your soul during the sacrament of reconciliation, which we did weekly as a family. 

Martin writes this passage as his young protagonist struggles to escape a dangerous priest midway through Father Sweet. That nameless boy falls victim to a monstrously abusive priest but grows up to find that his past trauma does not define his life in a story Kirkus Reviews calls “a beautiful portrayal of an unspeakable betrayal and the fraught path of a victim to recovery.”

Martin himself now lives in Toronto and works in software, but he grew up Catholic in Blackburn Hamlet. However, he stresses in his author’s note that his book is a work of fiction. Unfortunately, anyone writing about sexual abuse among Catholic priests need not look far to find real-life inspiration. “There was a lot of [it] going on in Ottawa,” says Martin, who felt strongly about setting his story in the area where he grew up due to the high number of cases uncovered there. “The church’s term is ‘hot spot,’ but all that really means is they got caught.” 

Martin read the work of the reporters who wrote about the crimes that were covered up, including those of several priests who were outed as abusers from that time period. He also studied religion and anthropology as a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, which informed his detailed portrayal of faith as a powerful cultural force. “There are very real people this story is based on,” says Martin, but he wanted to write a work of fiction so he could write about his characters’ inner lives and motivations as well as highlight the universality of these cases. 

The novel starts with the unnamed protagonist as a young boy from a working-class family. When Father Sweet comes sniffing around and asks to take the boy camping, he’s terrified of going but also of saying no. Attention from the priest meant the world to families who had nothing but faith, and all Father Sweet needed was to get the boy alone so he could manipulate and scare him into compliance and silence.

Writing as a child is hard enough, but writing a child’s experience of sexual abuse is almost impossible to get right. According to Kirkus, Martin “tackles the most gruesome of subjects with an extraordinary delicacy that never undermines the story’s brute power.” The passages with Father Sweet and the boy in the woods are harrowing and horrifying without ever crossing over into exploitation or “trauma porn.” 

Martin’s deft hand also stretches to the intersectionality of the issues around religious abuse, particularly in Canada. The Roman Catholic Church was heavily involved in the brutal “civilization” of Canada’s First Nations people, setting up “residential schools” where children were separated from their families and subjected to the worst kinds of neglect and abuse at the hands of corrupt and racist priests. “I wanted to show that for the white people who were involved, there was a real embracing of this behavior,” says Martin. “People willfully turned away and tacitly endorsed it by not doing anything.”

Eventually, Martin’s protagonist discovers a sickening connection to one such school, and the story shifts to include those kids’ stories. Martin worked with Indigenous sensitivity readers, including a survivor of a residential school, so he could “try to understand their viewpoint and include them in the story without appropriating their voices.” Most white people, especially Americans, are ignorant of what Martin calls “a government-sponsored apocalypse.” Martin feels his book is really a story about Canada, and as such, he knew he needed to be inclusive of Canadian cultural references that reflect the entirety of its history. In his author’s note, he is critical of the fact that the Canadian government’s disproportionate sponsorship of Catholic schools continues to this day. 

But surprisingly—and Martin feels it’s important to throw spoiler warnings aside here—there is a happy ending. Stories about trauma and abuse are dark; the subject matter doesn’t let them be anything else. And it’s important for books like Martin’s to exist; otherwise these stories stay secrets and necessary changes cannot be made. But when all the stories around trauma are only about the horror and violence, it can create the implication that the victims’ lives are defined by victimhood. Martin wanted to write something different, and he wants readers to know up front that his book isn’t one of those stories.

“[The story’s about] reconciliation and redemption….I don’t think the story of colonization can be a metaphor. But this story talks about how people use the vulnerable for their own ends, and there’s a way to fight back, there’s a way to make something constructive out of that.” Martin writes a character arc that’s about helping others and reclaiming oneself and doing so within the context of that trauma. 

Martin is a member of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and after speaking with so many survivors of religious abuse, he wanted to write a story that ended with hope, happiness, and loving families. There is justice as well, though perhaps not the wholly satisfying kind readers might crave. But in the end that doesn’t matter as much as the life the protagonist is able to build for himself. Eventually that little 12-year-old boy grows up, and as he works through his painful past, he sees a way to build a life for himself through helping others. He may even find his name, but readers will have to pick up the book to find out.

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.