Teenage years are difficult, even when growing up in what society thinks is normal. Changing emotions, physical changes, and raging hormones all play a part in creating havoc in young lives. But when you have to grow up in a culture society scorns or even hates, puts more stress on young lives and their ability to survive and become functioning adults.

Take all of these pressures and put them on a child growing up without loving parents, and other caring adults, and a life of fear, questioning, and terror is born. That's the life Michelle Dowd creates for us in her book Forager, where she writes about her life inside an ultra-conservative cult,

This is her story of survival and how she determined truth from lies, and fact from fiction. The thing that allowed her to escape is the one tenet of the cult she learned and took with her into the woods. She knew how to truly live off the land, and then used her skills and knowledge to find a new life.

Her story of survival is shocking and eye opening and written in rich text and stark dialogue.

Heartbreaking to imagine the author’s upbringing, and know it still happens, because there are still adults that share her parents’ beliefs and enforce them with their parental authority.

Oh, dear Michelle. The whole story is of a child, and how she is essentially raising herself. She mentions near the beginning that her mother is still alive, and does not want her to speak badly of the family and their religious upbringing. The author is true to her word, and does not intentionally speak poorly of her upbringing, but the straightforward presentation of her circumstances is hard to misunderstand.

Each chapter also opened with field notes of what she had learned of the plants around her as she grew up at the Field, a religious compound. She grew up expecting the end of the world to come soon, and her mother taught her how to survive in the end days. The field notes gave identifying details of plants, and how to harvest each one for any available nutrients, while hopefully not injuring or poisoning the one who needed it.

Luckily, her family did not completely shun the outside world and medical assistance, and the author got a temporary reprieve from all responsibility for herself when confronted with a medical condition as a child. Living with her grandma between hospital stays allowed her to see a little more of the outside world than her siblings, but also probably kept her from developing some of the same relationships within the cult that the rest of its members appreciated.

The insights and anecdotes of the author were so interesting. The book was definitely 3 out of 5 stars, and the author obviously gained a lot from her secretive reading to expand her vocabulary and knowledge of life on the outside. Her story could be recommended to those who like stories of children overcoming adversity, and it would be interesting if she told more about how her upbringing influenced her own adult life outside the Field.

Have you ever wrapped up the closing pages of a book and felt like your DNA had been altered?

Such is the case for me with Michelle Dowd's extraordinary "Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult," a fierce and remarkable story of Dowd's birth into an ultra-religious cult known by members as The Field that existed on a mountain within the Angeles National Forest and where she was raised to be prepared for the end of the world but also where she learned how to survive by foraging for what she needed.

"Forager" is a book that I stumbled across, a mutual friend of Dowd's talking about the book on social media raised my own curiosity as I am always seeking out the unique and inspired voices of other survivors who have somehow learned to love and heal and be tender despite living in worlds where just the opposite was true.

Again, such is the case in "Forager."

"Forager" is a heartbreaking tale, at times difficult to read yet most times impossible to not read. Led by her grandfather, The Field's patriarchal rules and literal interpretation of the Bible subjected Michelle and her siblings into extreme deprivation, isolation, and starvation for both love and food and security. In this environment, Dowd was forced to surviving by learning the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold. She learned to trust animals. She learned to trust nature. She learned to not trust human beings including those most would call family. She survived by foraging until she reached an age when she realized she had the ability to survive and the strength to survive. She learned about herself and nature and would ultimately have the strength to use this knowledge to survive the apocalyptic cult she lived in, I dare not call it home, during most of her childhood years.

There is a rhythm contained within "Forager" that I can't forget and I can't simply set aside. It is part familiarity, though in much different ways as someone who grew up a Jehovah's Witness in a severely disabled body who has been sexually assaulted far more than I've ever been loved and who now, even in this moment, deals with cancer while learning how to survive once again and love once again. My journey has been different yet I felt Dowd's journey way down deep in my bones.

The rhythm of "Forager" is one of survival and learning what love is and how to reach it. It's learning how to escape but also learning how to live free. At times, "Forager" feels like a forest chant of sacred rhythms as Dowd's vulnerability peacefully co-exists with her awe-inspiring strength and tenderness.

If you know me, you know that tenderness is my favorite word. Tenderness radiates throughout "Forager" through the wonder of this human being who learns how to love not because The Field tells her to or because the bible tells her to but because it's who she is and it could not be destroyed.

She could not be destroyed.

Each chapter opens with illustrations of edible plants along with a description of their value and purpose. The first chapter found me thinking "This is weird." By the end? I was in tears realizing how this knowledge had helped Dowd survive.

"Forager" is simultaneously haunting and exhilarating, an immersive reading experience that demands surrender to the knowledge of the evil that we humans can do to one another masking it as love when it is nothing like love. The Angeles National Forest is an urban national forest, a place both isolated yet also within grasp of the humanity that Dowd occasionally reached out for whether hospitalized or cleaning homes or simply taking baby steps toward the world around her.

At its core, "Forager" is a meditation on the ways the world around us can heal us and on the ways we can, in turn, heal ourselves and heal one another. Often haunting and stark and always impossible to forget, "Forager" is a masterpiece of hope and field notes for the journey toward a magnificent freedom.

Dowd writes her own story as she experienced it. And what a powerful thing it is.

Much of this book is from the perspective of a child, as if you were walking through her memories with her. She doesn't give much extra insight at all until she starts to break free of her family system towards the end, and I feel it really works for portraying the fact that her entire childhood is lived in survival mode. Not only surviving abuse and neglect from her immediate family, but also growing up as a member of The Field, a religious cult founded by her grandfather.

And in spite of all that hardship, the book manages to carry a sense of wonder, particularly for the natural world. You can feel how Dowd respects her mother's skill as a naturalist, and has inherited that love of the natural world and the pride in her own ability to forage. Sharing the plants and their uses at the beginning of each chapter is not only interesting, but it's a brilliant way of providing something natural and grounding to the reader as Dowd walks us through memories from a particularly difficult childhood.

Fans of Educated by Tara Westover will like this book. It's also excellent for anyone who loves nature and its ability to provide, for those who've felt a little lost or unmoored by elements out of their control, and for anyone who's had to break free.

A sad and interesting childhood. Reminds me of other similar books like Educated. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

“ The searing of our God is put inside of us, like rounds of chemotherapy, aiming to kill off all the bad parts and leave the good alone.”

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Michelle grows up in a cult started by her grandfather, it is Christian based so her femininity is a threat. Growing up she is indoctrinated into all sorts of unsettling beliefs. Her own keen mind and sense of self leaves her constantly questioning. She gives us glimpses of every day life, missions trips, survival training and her own issues with health and food. We know from the start she escapes but the story tells us how the pressure built and eventually how she is able to make her own way.

Michelle’s writing is fabulous, I don’t think I’ve ever highlighted so many passages in a book. I’ve not lived in a cult or family situation like she did but her writing allowed me to draw so many parallels to my own faith journey and sense of self. The writing feels quite raw and yet deeply introspective and enlightened at the same time. My only criticism is that I would have liked more of her life after she left. We do get enough to feel there is resolution but I would have loved more of her first time experiences with the day to day of non-secular life.

Thanks to Algonquin Books for the gifted copy. All opinions above are my own.

Book: Forager: Field Notes For Surviving in Family Cult: A Memoir
Author: Michelle Dowd
Rating: 4 Out of 5 Stars

I would like to thank the publisher, Algonquin Books, for providing me with an ARC.

I’m going to be upfront here. It took me some time to get into this one. While it is a memoir, it is told in present tense. At first, it made me come out of the story. However, the more I read the book, the more I found myself getting into the present tense. It turned out to be one of those situations where I thought something was not going to work, and ended up working. Now, I don’t think that any other tense would have worked.

In this one, we follow Michelle, who lives in a cult. She is not told that it is a cult though, but a community. It is super religious and whatever Grandpa says, goes. She is sheltered from the outside world, which she has been told is not a good place and will take her down the wrong path. She lives and breathes for this so-called community. The older she gets though, the more she comes to realize that it is not what it seems. She learns just how much she has been neglected, unloved, and unwelcomed. She learns that she has not had the best life and that her best interests have not been taken care of.

It was eye opening to see what she had to go through. It makes you stop and think about what all she went through. The bad thing is that this is all real. It makes you stop and think about your own life. You come to realize just how good of a life you may have. I am by no means saying that everyone reading this has a great life. What I am saying is that it makes you realize maybe just how truly blessed you are with what you have.

Michelle does an amazing job at casting everything on paper. She brings everything to life and allows you to see what she went through. The detail and the field guide notes also make it look and feel all that much more real. That’s what I am looking for in a book. I want to feel as if I am part of the story. That, to be, is the making of a good book.

Overall, I was very impressed with this book.

This book comes out March 7, 2023.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/M8Y8ZYoTtgs

Michelle Dowd’s childhood was spent in a family cult in California. From a young age she showed that she was more than what her parents expected of her. This memoir is a beautiful yet painful coming of age story that anyone who has survived trauma will relate to. I personally couldn’t get enough Michelle’s stories and zipped through the book. I absolutely love the cover and the layout of each chapter starting with a forgeable plant.

Highly recommend. Of course, trigger warnings for anyone who has experienced childhood trauma.

In the vein of memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle and novels such as The Great Alone, Michelle Dowd brings readers a chronicle of her pain, survival, and ultimately escape and growth.

The book is written in mostly chronological order, following Dowd through her childhood while also giving information about the founding of the "family cult" begun by her grandfather and involving multiple generations of her family in the forests of California. The metaphor of foraging and surviving is woven throughout the book in the form of "Field Notes" which describe the native flora and the many ways each can be used to survive, along with the survivalist skills taught by elders. Like the fibers of the yucca plant she describes, Dowd personifies the astounding threads of strength women can find and use to tether themselves to life in the face of misogyny and brutality committed in the name of religion. Proof yet again that women may not be the most powerful sex, but they are certainly the strongest.

I was provided an ARC review copy from NetGalley and Algonquin Books for an honest review.

This was a great memoir about growing up in her families religious cult, The Field.

Michelle Dowd had to adhere to strict religious rules under the control of her grandfather and parents. This has some great insight into a world many don’t see.

I have mixed thoughts about this book. When I hear the words "family cult" and "survivalists", I think about situations that are far more cut off from the outside world than what Dowd described in her book. While the rules with which she grew up were very strict, and she was taught to avoid "Outsiders" and "Quitters", it was interesting to know that she spent so much time in the hospital when she got sick. I remember when reading Tara Westover's Educated, that her family believed so strongly against formal medicine and outside influences that all illnesses and injuries, even life-threatening burns, were treated at home. However, Dowd's family did keep her separated when she finally came home, and did believe that her illness was a sign of "weakness" and an embarrassment to the family.

Overall, I found Dowd's story to be compelling and thus a quick read. I felt great empathy for her and her siblings and am glad she ultimately found her way out.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Fascinating and informative book about surviving living in a cult and the abuse that happens being in that cult.
Definitely eye opening.

This memoir is about growing up in a cult and surviving all types of abuse. It is about strength and escaping the cult. The foraging and field notes information in the book was very interesting.

A big thank-you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for giving me a copy of this book for an unbiased review.

4.5/5 - Really liked it.

Michelle Dowd, survivor of a family cult based in California, gives readers a raw and intimate look into her experience growing up and surviving within "The Field." The narrative is carefully structured so that readers experience a second-hand indoctrination. Dowd writes in the current tense with vivid, descriptive imagery and initiates her story with enviable descriptions of bucolic, independent life in the mountains of the Angeles National Forest. At just ten years old, she can identify which plants are safe to eat, how to survive in the wild, can navigate her surroundings by relying on the position of the stars, and spends her summers performing in a traveling circus. Her grandfather is the charismatic leader of a religious group, and aside from the occasional hint towards systemic violence and abuse, it doesn't sound too bad actually - who wouldn't want to grow up in the wilderness of a beautiful mountain range?

But then the fight for survival begins in earnest, and not just survival in a physical sense - Dowd is fighting for her very identity, for her right to exist and belong. She endures severe abuse - beatings from her father, emotional and psychological gaslighting from her community, sexual advances by men twice her age. She is abandoned with a severe illness in the hospital, watching her roommates die while her parents refuse to see her, claiming she has been rejected by God based on her own lack of inherent goodness. She longs for a hug from her mother. She can find food in the desert, but surrounded by family and community, she is starved for human connection.

This is the story of her fight to forage not just food from the ground, but in a deeper sense - Dowd speaks of her journey to forage goodness and compassion and love from that barren, uncultivated place in her own heart. And what she finds is abundant, crafting a story of deep vulnerability and beauty from the dark recesses of her childhood. Although the story is not always connected, with narrative threads that hang open-ended, the reader gets a clear understanding of her journey in escaping the cult into which she had been born. And her conclusions leave the reader feeling satiated, as if we have come out into the light alongside her.

"What if the earth isn't the devil's domain? What if nothing is wrong with the world as we know it, if nothing is wasted in nature or in love?"

"We are made for recovery."

As a memoir, this story has a lot of holes. It is told from the perspective of a child growing up in a dysfunctional family in a religious doomsday cult. The author and other children endure strict rules and physical abuse. The narrative jumps around a bit and many threads are started but never finished (I.e. when she takes the snowmobile away from the camp and …?, when she hoards money at her grandmother’s house but never retrieves it). The positive aspects are the information about scavenging edible food in the wild and how to survive if lost. Her story is horrific and I admire her strength of character to question the life she was born into and her courage in moving away from that life. She is obviously a very gifted, intelligent woman.

Thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books/ Workman Publishing Company for the ARC to read and review.

Browsing through NetGalley a while back, I found a book that basically had my name on it in flashing neon signs. It combined multiple interests of mine, and though it took a while, I was finally approved, and I was thrilled. Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult by Michelle Dowd (Algonquin Books, 2023) called my name from the moment I read the title, and I was correct: this book was a deeply engaging read, mining into a childhood filled with chaos, dystopian theology, and a love of nature that has remained with its author through her escape from the cult that created her.

Michelle Dowd was raised in California in her grandfather’s group known as The Field (which still exists today, but, under different leadership, is drastically different from the group in which Ms. Dowd grew up). The end of the world was nigh; group members would need to learn how to survive in the coming apocalypse, so Michelle, who received only three years of education at a public school, learned early on how to live off of what the earth could provide. Pine nuts, roots, berries, leaves, needles, bark, Michelle learned how to use them all. This education was the only form of affection her mother gave her; The Field taught that any kind of affection was wrong and unnecessary, and thus Michelle grows up starved for love, attention, food, and education, though her obvious intelligence is never in question.

An autoimmune disorder hospitalizes Michelle for months at a time; The Field states it’s because she’s an unfaithful Jezebel, her father never visits, and her mother blames her, with helpful statements such as, “Why are you doing this to me?” Throughout all of the chaos of her childhood - the physical and sexual abuse, the educational neglect, the lack of affection, the malnutrition, the illness, the anorexia and self-harm, the poverty, the persistent terror of eschatological theology preached by all the adults in her life - nature is her one constant, and it carries Michelle through to her eventual escape into the world she’d been made to fear her entire life.

Forager is a beautifully written memoir, and turning such suffering and fear into beauty is no easy task. It’s Educated-meets-I Want to Be Left Behind, and it’s utterly stunning in not just the depths of depravity in which Ms. Dowd was raised, but the constant unfolding knowledge of how far she had to climb to escape, a process not fully detailed (dare I hope for a second memoir from Ms. Dowd?), but one alluded to have taken years. Deconstruction and rebuilding is a difficult process and one that must've been especially challenging for a person raised in The Field. This book left me stunned, grateful for Ms. Dowd’s survival, and deeply concerned for other members - current and former - of this group.

Interspersed between the chapters are field notes on different plants that provide a little insight into the knowledge of the nature around her that Ms. Dowd absorbed as a child. The pictures she paints of the plants and trees that helped her survive and the way she describes the comfort she finds in nature and her ability to navigate it temper the intense descriptions of abuse, neglect, and apathy she grew up with. Like most memoirs that deal with heavy abuse, Forager can be tough to read at times, but ultimately, it’s well-balanced and will leave readers in awe of the strength it takes to survive a childhood like this one.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Algonquin Books, and Michelle Dowd for allowing me to read and review an early copy. Forager is available for purchase March 7, 2023.

I DNF'd this book. I do not think it was true to the title/advertising. I am an avid true crime reader, so when I saw "cult," I was intrigued. However, this book is more about how to be a survivalist in the wild than survive a cult. I was more interested in learning about the details of the cult rather than how long to boil tree bark so I can safely ingest it. I realize the author's survival knowledge and skills ultimately helped her escape the family cult, but the scales were tipped waaaaay over to the side of "here's how to eat flowers and stay hydrated without getting the poops" vs. an inside look at a family cult.

I also had trouble with what seemed to be "stream of consciousness" writing. The author would be in the middle of a story, and then all of a sudden the text changes to italics and we're receiving guidance on why we shouldn't eat snow. Totally disorganized -- do not recommend.

Forager is unlike any memoir I have read. Michelle Dowd’s story of her life in a cult is heartbreaking, emotional and beautiful as she ties the nature and survival skills she grew up in to the harmful cult begun by her grandfather.

If any book compares to this, I think is I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy because of the writing and overall story about family trauma and how someone copes with it. Unlike McCurdy, Dowd speaks about how her childhood was both harmful (overbearing, religious) and helpful and how she has become who she was through the experience.

Some parts nature document and other times heartbreaking memoir, Forager is a must read!

I feel horrible for saying this but the illustrations and foraging bits were the best part of the book. I wish she had a co-author, at times I felt like the book was a little hard to follow. I would have liked more some background and chronology about the group at the beginning, I felt like I was trying to piece it together as I read and it was distracting.

The amount of rules members of the cult had to follow were staggering. They also took a casual approach to animal welfare that was difficult to read. I did feel bad for her growing up there because she seemed like a bright critical thinker surrounded by people who were unkind and rigid. She has to handle so much herself from medical care to straight up foraging weeds for food. I can't imagine growing up in a group that wouldn't even let you pack a lunch for a hiking trip. Nothing they did seemed to make any real practical sense.

It was rather slow going at parts and I found myself wanting to skim.

Forager is an autobiography by Michelle Dowd who was taught foraging by her mother as she was raised in a cult in California. The book is really heartbreaking, and it is a wonder that Michelle even survives her childhood as it was really difficult and punctuated with sexual abuse, hunger, and lack of parental guidance and love.

Michelle and her family are part of the inner circle of The Field, a religious organization started by her grandfather. They were very Christian in their beliefs, and strict with their interpretation of the bible. The group lives far from most people in in the Los Angeles mountains and takes on mostly boys that have had a difficult time in the “real world”. There are so many rules, many unspoken, that govern the daily lives of the cult followers. As a child, Michelle bristles at the structure, and since she is left to herself so much of the time with little formal schooling and no parental love or support, her life takes some dark turns with so much abuse.

Michelle is a strong girl, distrusting of the outside world, and even when she has some life-threatening medical issues, she deals with hospital stays on her own and with little parental interaction. As she grows up her natural instincts kick in more and more and she finds herself getting into trouble and going against the rules of the cult.

How she is able to pull herself out and survive is really a miracle, given the issues she was dealing with. In the end, she is there for her mother, who would not be getting mother of the year award. We can all learn from this book.