Anthony Lincoln is sixteen, white, grieving his grandfather, and watching his mother disappear into depression while his father disappears into work. On the Saturday before Easter in April 2010, armed with an old shovel and no particular plan, he bikes from his comfortable Grosse Pointe home to Belle Isle — Detroit's island park — and digs up a pair of pink plastic glasses that change the way he sees everything.

The glasses don't create anything new. They reveal what Anthony has forgotten how to see: that beneath the surface of his bullying classmate, his emotionally absent father, and the scarred streets of Detroit lies something he can only call light. Over the course of one extraordinary week, guided and goaded by Perry, his freakishly funny, surprisingly wise best friend, Anthony moves from grief toward something that feels, cautiously, like grace.

This is a novel about a boy who reads Walter Mosley's 47 and recognizes himself in a slave boy's search for freedom, who invents The Totally Unholy Church of Anthony during Sunday Mass, and who ultimately buries his grandfather's glasses in a dirt angel on Belle Isle because some trades have to be fair. In the tradition of Potok's The Chosen and Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe — novels about serious, searching boys in specific American places — Pink JeZus brings that same urgency of place and spirit to Detroit in 2010, as the city itself teeters between collapse and something that might, against all odds, be called resurrection.