Born in Lafayette, Indiana, Scheeres received a bachelor's degree in Spanish from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a master's in journalism from the University of Southern California.

The memoir is centered on her relationship with her adoptive brother David, of African-American ancestry (Scheeres is white), and on their shared experiences coping with both religious and racial intolerance, in Lafayette, including at William Henry Harrison High School.

The trade publication Publishers Weekly declared the book "announces the author as a writer to watch," [2] and the Boston Globe praised it as "rough, brutal, and shockingly good.

In December 2011, Escuela Caribe, the reform school featured in her memoir, was closed down due to a successful internet campaign by alumni to expose its 40-year history of child abuse.

[4] Although their website states their program is not affiliated with New Horizons Youth Ministries, as of 2014 at least five staff members from Escuela Caribe remained employed at the school after the transition.

She also found notes and memos from the camp doctor, Larry Schacht, who struggled to find a way to kill the 900+ residents of Jonestown and experimented with botulism and other bacteria before settling on cyanide.

It's hard to imagine how people might be so browbeaten, afraid and misled that they would bring about their own deaths—but Scheeres has made that terrifying story believable and human."