Full review [here].

How does one find themselves in a cult? How does one wake up from a dozen years of brainwashing and closed circuit logic and reasoning? How does one slip from searching for personal growth to becoming a personal slave? This is Sarah Edmondson’s story.

This book appeals to the morbid curiosity we all have about what we don’t understand. The seemingly hardest portion of the book is tackled immediately in the first chapter so readers can spend the rest of the book really figuring out the “why” of it all. It is the most graphic portion of the story, in my opinion, and still worth the risk of being triggered to read.

In some ways, Sarah Edmondson’s story is, as she calls it, the tip of the proverbial ice berg. She acknowledges there are darker, more harrowing accounts of what happened that have yet to come to proper light. Only brief snippets mentioned of them from the trial, almost whetting the palate in a sinister way. Knowing they exist might make some people feel like Sarah’s book is a cop out for what could have been grittier, but ultimately this book isn’t about shocking the audience. By focusing on the “how” and “why,” I found this book to be more satisfactory than any serial killer Wikipedia article or Netflix true crime documentary.