Adolescence is never easy, but add a move to a foreign country, immersion in a fringe "spiritual community" and attendance at a school where your classmates throw rocks at you, and it becomes downright disturbing. In this quirky, frank coming-of-age memoir, television writer Brown deftly recounts her childhood spent in an ashram in India in the 1980s, as the only resident child in a community of (mostly) Westerners who worshipped Baba, a self-proclaimed leader of a vague spiritual "way of life." Brown, known to her parents as Mani Mao, spent her days at Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior School, the recounting of which is initially quite humorous, but soon takes a turn for the worse as readers realize the unending physical and emotional abuse Brown endured due to her foreign status. (A particularly funny scene occurs when Brown returns to India years later and is chased in her car by children who throw rocks. "Had their older siblings passed down the Legend of Mani Mao?" Brown wonders.) While extensive on the depictions of "Baba," whom Brown never met nor felt any connection to, this is a poignant memoir that reflects a painful time with wit and insight.

Like humorists Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, Brown taps into the terrain of her unusual--and, at times, unsettling--childhood for this engaging debut. In the early 1980s, seven-year-old Brown, a self-described misfit whose nose was forever poked in a book, was towed by her hippie parents to Ahmednagar, India, home to followers of the late Meher Baba. (The longtime guru to rock singer Pete Townsend, Baba is also credited with the cloying quote, "Don't worry, be happy.") As the sole foreign child in a backwater town, young Brown's encounters ranged from curious to chilling: beatific disciples, kooky pilgrims, and mean-spirited classmates who hurled rocks at her. Brown, now an award-winning television writer and playwright in Los Angeles, intermittently flashes forward to document her life after escaping the ashram at the age of 12, a narrative strategy that slows the pace of the book. But her mordant accounts of her Baba-worshipping mother and daily life in India (from its blistering heat and belligerent bugs to taxi drivers who clean their windshields with baked potatoes) enlighten and delight.