Tag: nonfiction

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

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My horrified fascination with cults and high-control religious groups began early in my adult life and continues to this day. Name a memoir written by a survivor of religious trauma and/or abuse and the odds are good that I’ve read it. So when I learned that Tia Levings, an incredibly brave woman whose story featured heavily throughout the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, was coming out with a book, I smashed that want-to-read button on Goodreads so quickly and so hard, I’m surprised my phone screen didn’t shatter. And when that book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St Martin’s Press, 2024), was offered up for review on NetGalley, I went running. I knew this book was going to be incredible.

And I was not disappointed.

But I was shaken. Deeply. It’s that kind of book.

Several times, I had to put my kindle down and take a few deep breaths. Several more times, I had to pull out the tissues, and during one moment, I needed to stop and hug my daughter (still crying, of course). 

Before I get into the meat of this review, please know that while this is an utterly amazing memoir that deserves to be read far and wide, it’s intense. It’s a LOT. It’s probably the heaviest escape memoir I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly, because survivor stories are always heavy with the pain and trauma they’ve suffered at the hands of their cult. That said, Tia Levings’ writing is raw; she doesn’t hold back on walking her readers through her trauma and letting them know that this isn’t just her story. This is the story of a lot of women who have gotten pulled into fundamentalism.

This memoir revolves around themes of abuse (spiritual and religious, physical, emotional, and sexual), Christian fundamentalism, domestic violence, misogyny, Christian patriarchy, fear, shame, fear of hell and loss of salvation, female submission, control, isolation, Christian Dominionism, Christian nationalism, Christian domestic discipline, quiverfull theology, ATI and Bill Gothard, Reform and Calvinist theology, repeat pregnancies, rape, painful sexual encounters, severe medical events, death of an infant, grief, diminishment and loss of self, dissociation, and mental illness. Take care of yourself when you read this book. It’s incredible the entire way through, but even if you’re not a survivor of religious abuse and trauma like Ms. Levings, there are potentially triggering topics on every page. Survivors will see a reflection of the nightmares they lived through; non-survivors will be shocked and appalled at the devastation wreaked upon women and children in the name of God. 

It was a family move to Florida, followed by her family’s eventual involvement with a Baptist megachurch, that set Tia Levings down a twisted path of Christian fundamentalism, patriarchy, and female submission. Due to a combination of heavy church influence and lack of family finances, Tia walked away from the idea of college (too worldly for Christian girls like her, anyway) and instead waited for God to send her a husband. And a husband was indeed sent – though by whom, I’m not sure – in the form of Allan, a Christian Air Force veteran who began abusing Tia even before they became engaged. But with the ideas of female submission and forgiveness firmly planted in Tia’s mind, she went along with what she’d been taught and married Allan anyway. It’s what a good Christian girl does.

Her long-anticipated wedding night was terrible, sounding like something straight out of Debi Pearl’s account of her own honeymoon (if you’re not familiar with the story, you can Google it, but I’m warning you, it’s horrific, and beware, because she and her awful husband are still some of the louder voices in this harmful patriarchal movement), and life only spiraled downward from there. “It’s my job to teach you what we believe,” Tia’s husband informed her. Another friend shamed her by telling her, “If you’re feeling personal ambition, Tia, you need to repent and ask Jesus to help you die to yourself.” It’s no wonder that she slowly began to feel like she was vanishing from her own life, using dissociation as a coping mechanism and losing large chunks of time as baby after baby joined their family.

Fundamentalist Christianity uses severe control tactics in order to keep women cowering and keep the men in charge, and this is evident in every sentence of this book. I scrawled down horrifying quote after horrifying quote in my notebook as I paged furiously through my kindle copy: “You disgust me with your opinions and individualism.” “The elders feel that women getting together is dangerous, because of our propensity to stray from spiritual topics into gossip when unattended by a head of household.” And, most chilling and stomach-turning of all, this quote, uttered by the husband of the woman in question: “Well, it’s time we should be getting home. Mommy’s getting a spanking.” And for context, the mother being referred to here was both pregnant and nursing at the time. And this wasn’t said in jest. This adult woman was going to be forcefully spanked like a child, as punishment, by her husband, upon returning to their house. This is an aspect of fundamentalism that Ms. Levings experienced as well. I nearly lost my lunch while reading the scenes that dealt with Christian domestic discipline.

Tia and her children eventually do make it out, but only barely, and the long-term effects ripple on today. Her story is told in such a way that you can feel her isolation, the mind-numbing boringness of it all, her desperation to give her kids the best life possible in the midst of all of this, her desire for more. And yet, her survival tactics of denial and downplaying make complete sense in the context of her religious indoctrination; this memoir is the best I’ve ever read at explaining the hows and whys of indoctrination and its effect on decision-making and survival. 

This book is going to make some waves. Not just among survivor communities, but also among the general public. Because at the heart of it, this book, along with Tia Levings’ vibrant social media presence, serves as a warning: THIS is how Christian fundamentalists and nationalists want us all to live. All the abuse, the pain, the isolation that she suffered, this is the reality that people on the far right are trying to craft for everyone in the country. Learn it, recognize it, and join the fight against it. 

If I could give this book more than five stars, I would. This is one of those books that I think no amount of words could ever do justice to in a review. It’s powerful, it’s masterful, it will shake you to your very core. Read this, but take care of yourself while you do. It’s not an easy read. Read it, then tell everyone you know about it so that they read it too, and are aware of how devastating patriarchal fundamentalist Christianity can be.

If you’re a survivor of religious trauma and/or spiritual abuse and are in need of support, please visit The Vashti Initiative. We’re here for you.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Tia Levings, and St Martin’s Press for providing me with an early copy for review.

A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy will be available on August 6th, 2024. Support your local bookstores!

Visit Tia Levings’ website here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

nonfiction

Book Review: All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell

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A few months ago, a friend of mine mentioned she was reading All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), and her description of the book intrigued me. I’ve read Mary Roach and Caitlin Doughty and found them both fascinating in different ways, so this book, about the death industry and the people who work in it, seemed right up my alley. And it was! But be warned: this book feels a lot heavier than those by Roach and Doughty. 

Trigger warnings for (unsurprisingly) a whole lot of mentions of death via various causes, including illness, accident, and mass tragedy. MAJOR content warnings for death of infants, including one specific infant whose death and subsequent postmortem procedures stuck with the author, and a chapter about a specialized midwife whose job it is to deliver babies who aren’t going to survive. PLEASE be aware of this before you read, and if there’s any reason this may be too much for you at this time, be good to yourself and read a different book. This was heavy for me to read, and I’m usually pretty tough when it comes to reading the tougher stuff.

Journalist Hayley Campbell embarks on a journey to discover the realities of those who work closely with death. From detectives to crime scene cleaners, embalmers and cremators, gravediggers and cryonic preservers, researchers and bereavement midwives, she interviews, participates, researches, learns, and comes to understand what the lives are like of those whose daily lives are centered around death. Some of these folks always wanted to go into the fields they’re in; others seemingly stumbled there. Some are bitter and jaded by their profession; others have developed an almost otherworldly sense of compassion. The differences are curious and thought-provoking.

Along the way, Hayley Campbell witnesses autopsies and cremations, deals with a lot of stress and questions surrounding the western cultural attitude toward death, and learns about herself and what she’s capable of handling. 

Whew, this was a heavy, heavy book. Some of the folks Ms. Campbell followed have been deeply affected by their work, to the point of bitterness and anger, and I felt bad for them. Anyone dealing with death on a daily basis has a tough job, and these people really seemed to struggle with both that and a lack of fulfillment (which is understandable. Their services are absolutely necessary, but seeing what they see, I get it). The chapters where Ms. Campbell includes description of an infant’s autopsy (and the subsequent mentions of this in later chapters, because even she struggled after a certain incident when the technician stepped out of the room; I won’t get into descriptions here) and her interview with the bereavement midwife (a specialty I’d never even heard of until reading this book) are a LOT, and they’re things that will stick with me forever. This book has definitely given me a more expansive respect for the people who work with the dead in all aspects.

Incredible book, but be aware of your mental state before diving in, and take breaks or step away if it’s too much.

Visit Haley Campbell’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle

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A few years back, I remember hearing about the Dozier School for Boys and the absolutely horrifying allegations of abuse that occurred there. There have been a few books that have come out about this place that I’m aware of, and I’ve always felt like I needed to read at least one of them, so when I heard about We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle (William Morrow, 2022), I added it to my TBR. 

In recent years, former students and family members of former students of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys have begun to step forward and demand justice for the terrible abuse suffered at the hands of the guards, teachers, and administration. Beatings, starvation, rape and sexual abuse, and murder were all regular occurrences, not that the state of Florida would admit any of this, but the still-traumatized former students and the families of students who never came home know the truth. Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle steps in to lead a search of the grounds, and the results are far more shocking than anyone could have predicted.

Even getting permission to search the grounds – doing scans of the ground to see if there’s even anything there, zero disturbing of the dirt – is fraught with bureaucracy. The local court system foils the investigators at every turn. Townspeople, whose livelihoods and local economy depended on the school for years, are loath to admit that anything was ever amiss with the school or its employees. Congressmen and congresswomen and the then-governor have to step in (thank goodness this took place under a completely different governor, because I’m fairly certain today that the survivors’ search for justice would be scoffed at as being too ‘woke’ to do anything about, sigh). And when Ms. Kimmerle and her team are finally able to begin their work, it turns out that more boys died at the hands of adults at the Dozier School for Boys than any paperwork mentions. 

This all makes for a very intriguing story, but to be honest, I found the writing a little dull. It plods on with a ton of detail about the archaeology, like, absolutely massive amounts of detail, which, to a lay person like me, didn’t much hold my interest. I’m more here for the emotional side of things: how did all of this affect the survivors and the families whose children went missing while at this school? What does the townspeople’s attitudes do to them? How does the search and the exhausting amount of bureaucracy affect the author? I wanted more of that and less description of machinery and equipment. I did learn some fascinating facts about how to tell when the earth has been disturbed, though, which is something I never really thought about before, so I definitely appreciated that.

Fascinating story, but the telling of it was bogged down a little too much with technical details for me to really connect with it. 

Visit Erin Kimmerle’s website here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward

StephanieLeave a comment

Little fascinates me more than religion and its intersection with human behavior. Why do people turn to a particular religion? What keeps them there? What does their involvement look like, and what leads them to leave it behind? It’s these perpetual questions that had me clicking that ‘want to read’ button on Goodreads when I learned about Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward (Brazos Press, 2023). And this book did not disappoint.  

Jon Ward grew up mired in evangelical Christianity. If you’re familiar with this world, you’ll recognize some of the names of the pastors and preachers who surrounded him. He was fully in, sold out, and adhered to all the principles he learned from his pastor father and the church during his childhood and adolescence. But as he grew older, Jon had questions that couldn’t be answered to his satisfaction, he began to realize that the teachings he’d absorbed so fully weren’t serving him well as an adult, and the hard right turn the evangelical church took to becoming a more political institution didn’t sit well with him at all. Working as a journalist opened his eyes to the hypocrisies and contradictions the evangelical church was making, and Jon began to move further and further away from what he’d grown up believing was the only way to live.

This is a deeply thoughtful, well-written memoir that delves into the tangled mess of the modern day evangelical church. It’s an excellent follow-up to Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, which I just finished, describing what happened to evangelical churches in the Trump era and picking up where that book left off. It’s eminently more readable and less academic (and less exhausting!) than The Evangelicals, though, which I highly appreciated. Jon Ward hasn’t been immune to the familial fractures caused by adherence to right-wing values amongst the evangelical community; he recounts many instances of how his family’s dedication to the Republican party overrode the teachings of Christianity, how much their conversations hurt him, and how this led to family members not speaking to him for years. I appreciate his honesty here, and I’m thinking an awful lot of folks are going to be able to see themselves in this memoir and identify with the pain he felt.

There are a lot of explanations of church history and functions, but not in a way that bogs the memoir down with information; rather, these brief asides only clarify what Mr. Ward experienced and illuminate the bigger picture. This is a well-thought-out, deeply honest memoir (boy, did I appreciate how Mr. Ward admitted his absorption of evangelical ideas about men and women affected his marriage. I wish more men were this introspective about the damage thata adherence to strict gender roles amongst the evangelical community damages not only women, but whole families. The whole idea of ‘If Mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy!’ is true. You can’t raise kids to be adults who understand they deserve to feel fulfilled by demanding their primary parent – because let’s face it, in families that subscribe to this mindset, mothers do the bulk of the hands-on parenting – derive fulfillment from only one role), and I imagine it can’t have been easy to write. I truly hope this book explodes and is read by all those who need it.

(Side note: I was getting in my car to drive home from an outdoor meeting with a local permaculture/sustainability group when I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR. It was deep enough into the interview that no names were mentioned, but as the interviewer and interviewee spoke, my brain started whirring, and I went, “Wait, is that Jon Ward???” And sure enough, it was! If you’d like to listen to the interview, you can find it here.)

Visit Jon Ward’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning

StephanieLeave a comment

Between watching the increasingly disturbing news, seeing the evidence myself on Twitter, and recently reading a few books about the subject, the fact that white nationalism and hate groups are growing isn’t a surprise. It’s all horrifying, but if you pay even a little attention out there, you’ll see evidence of it all over. So when I was browsing NetGalley and came across The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning (Sourcebooks, 2023), I immediately requested it. It’s a difficult subject to read about, but I think it’s necessary to be informed. I was grateful when NetGalley approved me, and with more than a little trepidation, I downloaded the book and began reading.

For over twenty years, Matson Browning worked undercover with white and Christian nationalist and other sovereign citizen groups, including groups who took it upon themselves to patrol the border (under zero authority other than the one they assigned themselves due to the color of their skin or the place of their birth). He got to know white supremacists, KKK members, churchgoers who interpreted their scriptures in such a way that they were confident Jesus agreed with their hateful and xenophobic opinions, criminals of all sorts (including murderers), people who would later get murdered, and people he never would’ve assumed would be part of these groups, including pastors, teachers, members of the military/veterans, and police officers, including some newer recruits in Mr. Browning’s own unit.

The attitudes of the people Mr. Browning, posing as a white nationalist named Packy, works with are disturbing, hateful, and frightening…but what might be even more disturbing is how little anyone in the US seems to care about the existence of these groups. Mr. Matson’s fellow police officers weren’t much interested; the higher-ups whom he worked for seemed to roll their eyes and sigh every time he infiltrated a new group. Murders – even murders of multiple people at once – were brushed off, simply because these weren’t the regular Black or Mexican street gangs. How bad could a bunch of white guys be?

Very bad, in fact. The Hate Next Door and Matson Browning’s career is a testament to that.

Matson Browning, along with his wife Tawni, who also went undercover with him, shows over and over again how deeply dangerous these groups are, and how they’re everywhere in the US. In this disturbing account of a career spent investigating one of America’s many dirty little secrets, the authors provide story after story that will have every reader taking a closer look at everyone they know. 

The Hate Next Door isn’t an easy, relaxing read. It’s the kind of read that will have you sucking in a quick breath as you realize the danger Matson Browning put himself in in order to infiltrate these groups. It’ll have you side-eyeing the people you work with, your neighbors, the person in front of you at the grocery store. It will change the way you look at everyone around you…but it also gives a little bit of hope. There *are* people who leave these movements behind, and Mr. Browning provides a basic list of things you can do in order to maybe steer a friend or colleague away from this path (a long game, for sure, but worth it). 

This is a disturbing book, but a tragically necessary one. Read it to understand better what’s hiding in plain sight everywhere across the US and, sadly, also around the world. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Matson and Tawni Browning, and Sourcebooks for providing me a copy of this excellent book to read and review. The Hate Next Door is available on July 4, 2023. Support your local bookstores!

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

Stephanie1 Comment

I’ve been appalled by the Troubled Teen Industry in the US ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Kids, and when I recently learned about the existence of Stolen: A Memoir by Elizabeth Gilpin (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) in The Elissas, about her experiences as a teenager forced into this industry, it immediately went onto my list. And then into my stack of books it went on one of my last library trips.

As a teenager, Elizabeth Gilpin was stolen from her bed in the middle of the night by two dark-clothed strangers and hustled off to an outdoor camp for troubled teens, where she spent the next three months hiking, living outdoors full-time, and starving, subsisting on things like raw oatmeal and uncooked raw beans. This was her parents’ first solution to her teenage behaviors such as being argumentative, dating, going to parties, drinking, and being angry. After completing this program, she was shipped off to a ‘therapeutic’ boarding school whose techniques for healing these teens (whose problems ranged from anorexia to heroin addiction to depression to attending parties and drinking to being gay) were modeled on the Synanon cult. Healthy!

Instead of helping these teenagers to develop a healthy sense of identity and deal with their feelings, this ‘school’ responded by shaming the students in its care and abusing them physically and emotionally, making them repeat on a daily basis how worthless they all were. Is it any wonder that one by one, far too many of Elizabeth’s classmates began dying as soon as they left the school? The trauma these schools impart lives on long past graduation, and Elizabeth Gilpin’s memoir is proof positive of that.

Anyone even considering sending your child to one of these places needs to read this book (and Maia Szalavitz’s as well). These schools and camps are entirely unregulated; it’s like sending your sick grandpa into an abandoned building with a sheet spray-painted with ‘HAWSPITTLE’ flapping outside. DON’T DO IT. Elizabeth lost weight; she was injured; the adults were physically and emotionally abusive and manipulative, and not a damn thing was done to actually help her or her classmates grow into confident, capable adults able to cope with their problems and the stress of the real world. These camps do nothing but damage kids who are already hurting. They’re not the solution.

I’d love to see another memoir by Ms. Gilpin, if she’s up to it, about her relationship with her family and what that’s been like. I *think* she said she’s worked through a lot in therapy over the years, which, to me is amazing; I’m not sure I’d have it in me to still be able to have a relationship with my family after they sent me to one of these places. That’s some *serious* work, and I deeply hope her family has done the work as well in order to understand what she went through. My heart breaks for her and others who have suffered because of this unregulated, unsafe, bullshit industry.

If you enjoy the memoir genre, this is one you don’t want to miss.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

Stephanie1 Comment

It was another Wednesday ‘what are we reading this week’ thread in my online book group where a friend mentioned reading The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Allen Lane, 2022), and of course another friend from that same group knows the author and her husband, because it’s nothing if not an extremely small world, right??? The premise of the book immediately appealed to me, so onto my TBR it went.

World War I is known for being horrifically bloody and deadly. The destruction power of weapons was upped massively compared to previous wars, and medicine had yet to catch up. What that meant was a lot of soldiers with devastating injuries, but when you think of war-injured WWI soldiers, you think of someone on crutches, maybe a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, maybe missing an arm or a leg below the knee. You don’t think of someone missing their entire lower jaw, or of having no nose, or just having a gaping hole where the middle of his face used to be. All these weren’t uncommon injuries at the time. The shooting power and accuracy of guns had increased, and men were having their entire faces destroyed.

Enter Harold Gillies, a surgeon able to see through such wreckage and begin to devise methods to repair some of the damage. He developed techniques that basically invented the entire field of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction, techniques that are still used today. Whereas people use to recoil from these men in public, his surgeries (sometimes numbering in the dozens for one single man, all spaced out so that the patient would have time to heal) gave them a new lease on life and far more normalcy than they could have expected otherwise.

Warning: there are pictures. They’re not pretty. Even the ‘after’ photos aren’t easy to look at. The descriptions of some of the injuries and surgical procedures, while not being excessive in number or content, made my stomach turn. It’s hard to read about. But this is a part of World War I – and war in general – that I haven’t seen discussed a whole lot. What happens, what does life look like, when a soldier comes back from war with massive facial injuries? What does the healing process look like? What does life look like afterwards for that person, and what is their place in society? If you’re not a pacifist before reading this, putting yourself in the injured soldiers’ shoes will definitely make you one.

Fascinating book about an aspect of the first World War that’s definitely not taught in school.

Visit Lindsey Fitzharris’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater

Stephanie3 Comments

Book friends are really the best, aren’t they? A few weeks ago, in our weekly ‘what are you reading’ book discussion, a friend said she was reading The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). I checked it out on Goodreads and immediately clicked the want-to-read button, because the premise so intrigued me, and on a recent trip to the library with my oldest child, who has been doing a lot of reading from the YA section lately, I grabbed a copy of this book from the small YA nonfiction section. And I wasn’t disappointed. If you’ve ever thought that crime was cut and dry, black and white, lock them up and throw away the key because crime is committed by horrible people, this is a book that will have you reconsidering everything you thought you knew.

Sasha, an agender teenager, was riding the bus home from school one day when another teenager, Richard, who was getting rowdy with and being egged on by friends, lit their skirt on fire, thinking it would only smolder before waking Sasha up, and that this would be a good prank. Instead, Sasha’s gauzy skirt lit up, leaving them with second and third-degree burns over something like a third of their body. Richard is arrested and charged with a hate crime, tried as an adult despite the fact that he was a teenager, and in a way that leaves him facing life in prison. But the story isn’t as simple as ‘this kid committed a hate crime, lock him up and throw away the key.’ Dashka Slater does an amazing job of taking a hard look at a lot of complex topics, and she does it all in a way that’s accessible to teens learning to understand these issues.

Heavy subjects here. A good portion of the book deals with gender and gender identity; Ms. Slater was learning about the topic herself and lays everything out in a way that’s easy to understand. Sasha was lucky to be born into a family and community of people who accepted them for who they were, amongst a crowd of friends who rallied around them and loved them unconditionally. Richard, who grew up in a family and a community mired in poverty and violence, wasn’t so fortunate (to be entirely honest, his family seemed completely normal; I really felt for his mother while reading this); the choices we as a society make about poverty and who deserves what lead to communities beleaguered by the problems Richard’s community faces. We also compound the problem by immediately absolving ourselves as a society of any responsibility for these problems and the crime they so often lead to, and this is obvious in the way that Richard was quickly charged as an adult, with life in prison on the line. We also like to discount the science of brain development and ignore the fact that teenage brains are not adult brains. They make stupid, shitty, impulsive decisions because their brains are literally not yet fully formed. It’s like sending your newborn to their room without dinner because they waved an arm they’re not fully in control of and hit you in the face. We all know it takes babies a few months to even figure out they can willfully move their arms and hands around and use them with purpose; teenage brains are the same in terms of development, but instead of understanding this and incorporating that knowledge into our society, we’ve turned that completely normal underdevelopment into a problem for which the only solution is throwing the whole teenager away.

The strength of Sasha and their family in this book is enormous; their understanding and willingness to look beyond their own pain and the media’s narrative is remarkable. I’m not sure I would be so quick to understand or move on, honestly; I like to think I *could* get there, but it would take some work. The pain and bewilderment of Richard’s friends and family was a lot to read about. They were confused, still struggling with the realities of their everyday lives while trying to figure out why Richard did what he did and trying to be supportive while he fought to even have a future at all. 

This was just so sad and hard to read, and Ms. Slater does such a fabulous job of illustrating the depth of problems in our society surrounding all the issues covered in this book: understanding of gender, safety for LGBTQ+ folks, poverty, income disparity, violence, the many, many problems with our justice system, and so much more. I read this all in one day, but it’s a story that will stick with me forever.

Visit Dashka Slater’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach

Stephanie1 Comment

Browsing through NetGalley, I came across a title that intrigued me: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach (Legacy Lit, 2023). A brief glance at the blurb had me hitting the REQUEST button: this was a tale about the nightmarish Troubled Teen Industry, something that’s interested me ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s damning exposé on the topic, Help at Any Cost, years ago. I was so thrilled when I saw that I’d been approved, and I took a deep breath, settled in with my kindle, and began to read.

Author Samantha Leach grew up with one of the titular Elissas, a born-to-be-wild child who absorbed far too many of the cultural messages that surrounded her, growing up in the early-to-mid 2000’s in a cultural landscape laced with Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, about what a woman’s role and place in this world should be. Proudly proclaiming at the beginning of her teenage years that she wanted to be a slut, Elissa’s path into adolescence is fraught with risky sexual behavior, drinking, and drug use. At fifteen, her parents ship her off to a school in Nebraska that promises to reform her behavior, part of the unregulated Troubled Teen Industry that’s allowed to function with little-to-no oversight in the US and has been responsible for a truly horrifying number of child deaths. 

Using Elissa’s story, along with the stories of two friends she became close to at this school, Alyssa and Alissa, Ms. Leach illustrates one of the least-discussed problems of the Troubled Teen Industry: these schools serve as holding pens at best, mirrors of the US prison system at worst, for struggling teenagers, teaching them how to do little more than survive in a strict, closed system, and giving them none of the tools to navigate the outside world and the behaviors and issues that so concerned their parents in the first place. One by one, in the brief years after graduation, each Elissa dies, likely due to behavior related to the problems that got them sent to this Nebraska school, leaving behind a trail of pain, anguish, grief, devastation, and so, so many questions.

While the author’s writing style wasn’t always my personal cup of tea, I do think she achieved her goals of memorializing her friend and exposing what’s likely the least talked-about problem of the Troubled Teen Industry. Much has been made, and rightfully so, of its lack of oversight and the harsh punishments doled out to the students in their care, but there’s so little follow-up and no real statistics to tell what their programs actually do in the long-term, and thus it seems that they’re not preparing students for the outside world and to return to their former addiction, the temptations waiting for them, the challenges and struggles they’ll face when they return to the same environment they were living in before entering these “schools.”

There are those, Ms. Leach notes, who are helped by the Troubled Teen Industry, teens who take what they need from the incredibly expensive schools their parents ship them off to and end up the better for it. The Three Elissas is not a story that documents anything close to that. It’s not Maia Szalavitz, but it’s a cautionary tale all the same. These schools, Ms. Leach shows, are not places to send your children if you’re hoping for a long-term solution, and the tragedy of the three young women – Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa – are proof enough. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Legacy Lit, and Samantha Leach for allowing me to read an early copy of The Three Elissas.

The Three Elissas is available for purchase on June 6, 2023. Support your local bookstores!


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memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen

Stephanie1 Comment

Another 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge: a book by a first time author! I dug through my TBR and came up with something I’d been wanting to read for a while: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen (Penguin Books, 2020). My older child is super into amusement park history and has told me about Action Park before, so I was really curious about this book (plus I’d heard great things about it). It was, however, at a different library, and I just hadn’t made it over there yet. But for this challenge, my hand was forced, and this ended up being a very good thing.

Action Park in New Jersey was known for sending its park-goers home with injuries, some of them serious. Guests could expect bruises, bumps, abrasions, broken bones, concussions, all the way up to drownings and death. No, really. But to Andy Mulvihill, the park was his childhood and his young adulthood. Created by his father, Gene, the park put the guests in control of the action…but, as we know, people often don’t behave as they should.

Go-cart-style cars were crashed and flipped. Scooters that raced down a mountainside at top speed led to scars and broken bones. The wave pool, with its murky water, had the lifeguards on high alert at all times, and with good reason: the number of people they had to rescue each shift was appallingly high. Fights broke out in the park often, sanitation was nearly impossible to keep up with, and the whole thing seemed to be uncontrollable chaos. But this place was beloved, and Andy Mulvihill’s love for both the park and his dreamer father are evident on every page.

This is a fun, FUN book. The way Mr. Mulvihill and Mr. Rossen describe the many horrifying incidents at the park had me laughing out loud multiple times (and then questioning if I should be laughing at that at all!). A few times, I burst into my older kid’s room to relay something that they inevitably already knew, but I was just so shocked by. Gene Mulvihill made so many choices for his park that would never, ever fly today (and Andy Mulvihill acknowledges this), but somehow, the park’s attendance just kept growing, year after year. Product of its time and place, I suppose.

Seriously, this is a SUPER fun book, both a memoir and a history of the wildest amusement park I’ve ever heard of, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. What an absolute delight it was to spend a few days lost in its pages.