First I want to thank HarperCollins and Netgalley for the ARC of this fascinating book. I've read a few novels and also true stories about religious cults and the people who join them and live within them. A cult is not, and cannot be described as organized religion. It is, by definition, a relatively small group of people who have a misplaced and/or excessive love and devotion to a certain person who teaches unusual and possibly dangerous beliefs or practices which can be seen as strange and even sinister. Here our main character is a woman who is married to her college sweetheart and together, at his urging, they join a small group of a religious sect in Texas. The story is unsettling, complicated and tense.

In some ways, I genuinely liked it. It swept me along the way few novels can...and then this happened, then this, than THIS. I could not put it down even though my work and other responsibilities beckoned. Rosemary, the main character, is a former gymnast - the kind we all watch in the Olympic games. When she compared her feelings about her marriage and seeming failure to get pregnant to the demands she made of her body as an Olympic athlete, I could not stop thinking about it. She had learned to get up immediately when she fell, and she had learned she must never cry in front of anyone. But when the houses in the little community regularly caught fire and it was against the rules ("God's rules") to call the fire company, I was horrified. Likewise, the head of the group, charismatic "Papa Jake," made other rules and routines that denigrated and disparaged girls and women that made me squirm and my mind revolt. But I kept reading to find out what would happen next.

My issues with the style of the writing ultimately caused my issues with the story itself. Rosemary tells much of the story in a stream of consciousness that was annoying and off-putting for me. Some conversations are contained in proper quotation marks but many others are not...also annoying to me. My other issue was the way it ended, and I will not engage in spoilers here. But let me say the ending and the epilogue were so aggravating to me that it lost a star, and I cannot think of it as a four star novel. You will have to decide that for yourself.