Author: Rebecca Stott
Published: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 400
Rating: 4/5
Summary:
In this memoir, the author explores her relationship with her father, her upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian cult and her family eventually breaking away from everything they've ever known.
Review:
I can never resist a book about a cult, I have to admit, and this one was really interesting.
I think this is written in a really interesting way; the story varies between being quite straight-forward and almost distant to being deeply personal and emotional. The parts that were a bit more dry, like the exploration of the history of the cult, were to me not as intriguing, but the stories of the author growing up and reading about her family was incredibly fascinating.
One thing I thought was particularly interesting in this was how you get to follow a faith becoming a cult, how that might happen and how people get caught up in it. I also thought it was both absorbing and incredibly sad to read how the doctrine of the cult affected the authors young mind; can you imagine spending your time preparing, at the age of five or six, for the End of Days, thinking that since you're probably not good enough to be picked among the select few, you'll have to stay behind and take care of your siblings without your parents? That's horrible.
Although it's not a perfect book, I love that we get to peek behind the curtain of this world and get to know some of the people there. It's a very interesting look at religion, humanity and family.
You can read more about it on Goodreads
