This new narrative of Aimee Semple McPherson's early years by Chas H. Barfoot occupies a space somewhere between academic and popular or journalistic biographies. For while Barfoot avoids simple hagiography and attempts to place his subject within a broader historical context, he nevertheless eschews formal academic protocols of detachment, writing in a personal tone as one touched by the legacy of Sister Aimee. Much like invaluable local histories, Barfoot's biography, however, offers a trove of anecdotes, events, sources, descriptions, and photographs relating to the emergence of McPherson on the national stage.

Barfoot arranges the material to argue that McPherson moved a large sector of the emerging Pentecostal movement to a middle position between Fundamentalism and mainline Protestantism—a position similar to the one currently held by interdenominational Evangelical megachurches. While Barfoot does not rigorously defend this argument, he presents anecdotal evidence that this was McPherson's intent, and that, to a certain extent, she achieved this goal. In arguing this point, Barfoot contrasts, on the one hand, her ecumenical and irenic style to Fundamentalists like “Fighting” Bob Shuler or Billy Sunday, and, on the other hand, notes her attempts to attract a middle-class, mainline Protestant audience by dampening the emotional excesses and theological innovations of her own Pentecostalism. Barfoot's argument thus corroborates similar ones by Edith Blumhofer (Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994]) and Matthew Sutton (Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007]); yet, Barfoot disagrees with Sutton over McPherson's historical relationship to Fundamentalism. Scholars researching McPherson or early Pentecostalism can mine useful material in Barfoot's work, such as rare photographs, anecdotes about her life and ministry, lengthy box quotations, and leads on rare sources. As a work aimed only in part at a scholarly audience, however, it would have benefitted from more judicious editing, especially the compression of lengthy sections offering historical or social context or details from the author's life.