A Cheerleader's Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“I knew Mary Beth Caschetta was a brilliant writer from her Modern Love essay about being disinherited. What I didn’t know until I read her stunning nonfiction collection is that she is also a trailblazing activist ex-cheerleader poodle-loving almost-nun. And those aren’t even spoilers.”

—Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors and Toil & Trouble

PRAISE FOR MB CASCHETTA

PRETEND I’M YOUR FRIEND

“There are, I suppose, stories full of brilliance, hilarity, and longing—the stories in MB Caschetta’s terrific Pretend I’m Your Friend are full of all these things—but I can’t remember when I’ve read a collection so full of life. Actual life: the bad jokes, the astounding velocity, the sweetness and darkness. You will love the characters here the way you love your own family: complicatedly, with tenderness, understanding, and consternation. The only difference may be how willing—and eager—you are to introduce them to friends. Good heavens, this book is good.”

—Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck

“A book of youthful verve, humor, melancholy and desire. It confronts the central mysteries: sexual, familial and spiritual, with elegance and aplomb.” —Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child

“Short stories that frequently touch on endings—of love, relationship bonds, even life itself—link back to one another in surprising ways in this collection...The confrontations and losses can be gutting, but the ways they tie to one another create a strengthened bond among the survivors; there’s hope amid the ruins created here.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An affecting collection...about...the things we do for love.” —People Magazine

“Caschetta’s prose is simple and evocative—and as she skillfully weaves these individual lives together, she reveals a complex tapestry of human experience.”—Entertainment Weekly

“MB Caschetta’s brilliant Pretend I’m Your Friend is one of the year’s finest short story collections.” —Largehearted Boy

MIRACLE GIRLS

2015 USA Best Book Award Winner for Literary Fiction

2015 Independent Publishers Book (IPPY) Gold Medal

2015 Spiritual Book Winner at the Paris Book Festival

2015 Spiritual Book Winner at the San Francisco Book Festival

2015 Spiritual Book Winner at the Amsterdam Book Festival

Honorable Mention in Spiritual Fiction at the 2015 Los Angeles Book Festival Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2015 New York Book Festival

An IndeFAB 2015 Book of the Year Award Honorable Mention in the LGBT Book Category An IndeFAB 2015 Book of the Year Award Nominee in the Religious Book Category Lambda Literary Award 2014 Lesbian Fiction Category Finalist

“Darkly beautiful, Girls examines how forgiveness and wisdom take hold in the most unexpected places.” —People Magazine

“A mesmerizing first novel.” —Huffington Post

“In upstate New York, young girls go missing, nuns are revolting, Nixon is resigning, and young Cee-Cee Bianco has visions of the Virgin Mary in this polished debut novel...Caschetta’s first novel is filled with a kind of dark poetry and the menace of ordinary evils.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Compulsively readable.” —Lambda Literary Review

“A stunning debut novel about an unforgettable dysfunctional family and faith.” —Largehearted Boy

“This debut sparkles; Miracle Girls is that rarest thing: a literary miracle. MB Caschetta will break your heart and mend it all at once.” —Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half a Life

“It’s not every day the Virgin Mary makes an appearance in a novel. And how fitting that MB Caschetta invites her into a story where a grandmother provides safety and thousands of prayers; where law-breaking nuns save desperate girls; where life hurts and is full of grace; a world where miracles happen. MB doesn’t flinch from writing painful truths nor does she flinch from lifting her characters up and us along with them. Miracle Girls is a wonderful book I will give to friends.” —Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars With Boys, Looking for Mary, and Astonished

“What MB Caschetta’s novel brilliantly proposes is an underground railroad for girls. It feels like one of those girls grew up and wrote Miracle Girls. I loved reading it and rooting for CeeCee as she struggles to survive her own family and her saintly little girl voyage with the aid of intergenerational healing, and the vintage magic of radical nuns and priests from a time when they worked for peace and helped the lost girls of the world find home.” —Eileen Myles, author of Inferno: A Poet’s Novel and Snowflake

“A wondrous and exhilarating novel. The Bianco family is unforgettable in all its catastrophic dysfunction but also in the capacity of some of its most broken members to fight their way toward salvation. Miracle Girls is an unflinching, fantastical and unexpectedly healing act of the imagination. You won’t have read anything quite like it, and you’re not likely soon to forget it either.”—Paul Russell, author of Immaculate Blue and The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

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