A free-spirited teenager with only the clothes on her back and the weight of uncertainty in her heart, D'Arcy Fallon found shelter as a vagabond hitchhiker in 1972.

"At the center of my life was Jesus, who had saved me from wandering America's highways," the Colorado Springs author writes in her memoir, So Late, So Soon.

The book is a recounting of her experiences as a member of a Christian commune in the woods of California in the 1970s. Sexy, silly and somber, Fallon's memoir is not the story of the bizarre goings-on inside a mysterious religious community. Rather, it's about the quirky ways the commune complements her search for a place in the world and her struggle with faith.

Fallon writes that, as a child, she was a "chronicler, voyeur, pulse-taker, pint-sized drama queen." With her recent high school graduation behind her, 18-year-old Fallon hitches rides on California's roads in search of adventure and freedom from the seemingly oppressive walls of her parents' home.

She winds up at a religious commune called the Lighthouse Ranch, after one of its members picks her up along the road and gives her what proves to be a life-changing ride to a destination that would define her adult life.

Her traveling companion, Josh, quickly abandons her at the ranch after she says she wishes to stay a bit longer. "They got you. You're brainwashed, aren't you?" Josh says.

But the Lighthouse Ranch isn't a Charles Manson commune replete with rampant sex and drugs. It's not a David Koresh commune with stockpiles of weapons and 13-year-old wives. Instead, it's a place where deeply devout people gather to share rituals, room together and help one another, all in the name of the Lord. Though the ranch is the epicenter for its members' lives, members are not holed up at the commune; they are allowed to mingle with the surrounding townspeople.

Fallon - whose mother hung on her kitchen wall an explicit poster dismissing housework - soon finds herself performing menial chores as part of her service to God. She scrubs bathrooms, prepares meals and cleans the kitchen.

Throughout the three-plus years she spends at the commune, Fallon remains in limbo - never certain she wishes to dwell in the real world, never fully committed to the teachings of the commune. Various anecdotes throughout the book signal her inability to shut out the whispers of her life before the ranch.

When she first arrives at the commune and witnesses a ceremony during which members chant in tongues, for example, she transforms the spiritual babblings into amusing rhymes.

"And then she began muttering in tongues: Sha-na. Sha-na-na-na. Condola. Gondola. Shondola agondola. I repeated the words to myself, spinning out new phrases . . . Shonda. Gonda. I've got a Honda! Stop it!"

As she stares at a stain on the carpet while listening to the testimony of "Jesus freaks," she imagines it resembles Richard Nixon's head.

Amid the pious community, she is a young soul drawn to that which is dramatic and racy. During her first weeks at the ranch, she speaks with a sister who tells her Jesus is her lover. Fallon's teenage mind runs wild as she imagines Jesus as a sensual being in a Madonna-like fantasy.

"Jesus took me in his arms and kissed me on the lips. He knew everything about me. He knew about French kissing."

But as literal as she can sometimes be, she also is drawn to the more ephemeral joys of commune life. It is her ability to articulate the intangible that lends poetry to her prose.

"My heart was a balloon on a string," she writes of hearing the strains of congregational praise music. "'Glory!' someone would shout. Glore-ree. The word expanded and opened up like a peony. It was sweet and dense, butterscotch on the tongue."

Fallon describes her struggles with the ritual of speaking in tongues and the tenets of the commune that dictate that women should be subservient. But she does not use the members of the Lighthouse Ranch and their beliefs to create a sensational exposé. Rather, they act as a vehicle through which she examines her own maturation.

So Late, So Soon beautifully contrasts Fallon's static existence at the ranch and the tumult in her soul. It is to the author's credit that, despite her ultimate rejection of the commune and many of its teachings, she crafts a tale in which the reader understands what drew the young nomad to live in cramped quarters and scrub toilets in the name of Jesus Christ.

The memoir will reverberate with readers who invest themselves in this saga of one woman's quest for a place to call home - to her "a slippery word."

"Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, you open it up," she writes of the concept of home, "and there's another meaning, and another, and another."

Jill Boyd is a journalist living in Longmont.

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