Hello Friends!

I mentioned in my last post that I’m scheduling a few posts early so that I can take a break for a three weeks and fully concentrate on starting a new project, a middle grade novel. So, I won’t have a lot of up-to-date book challenge news on these.

My YA novel Keep Sweet is launching in June 2025. As I write this, I’m deciding on the book cover. The artist has provided five great choices, so I have a hard decision, but how lucky is it to have that choice?

Keep Sweet is about a teen, her twin brother and older sister, and her two friends, all of whom want to escape from their polygamist cult in the American Southwest desert. One of the things I focused on while working on this novel and have continued to read about is spiritual abuse, which is often tied with sexual abuse.

There are a lot of good nonfiction books about cults, including some very recent memoirs. Judging by the number of ‘religious abuse’ docuseries streaming lately, I know I’m not alone in my interest. Not long ago, I wrote in Be a Cactus about Tia Levings’ A Well-trained Wife. This week, let’s look at the memoir Rift by Cait West.

Rift by Cait West

The title Rift is a nod to the author’s break from Christian patriarchy’s stay-at-home daughter movement, but it also refers to the meditations throughout the memoir about the geology of the land she lives on in the Midwest, West, and Hawai’i. The author wishes to show that the land forms the individual. Ultimately though, this is a story of:

…loss and separation.This is a story of chaos, of fragmentation, hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. This is a story of escape and risk and making it all worth it. This is a story of psychological, emotional, financial, and spiritual abuse. This is my story of survival.

Christian Patriarchy and the Stay-at-Home Daughter Movement

West is raised in Christian patriarchy, and her father joins more and more repressive churches. He becomes an adherent of the stay-at-home daughter movement. In this movement, there is no dating. Men decide who their daughters will spend time with and whether those men will ultimately make good husbands. Ironically, Mr. West and his wife met, immediately became engaged and married. That is, they controlled their own lives, futures, and marriage. Yet, he decides to oversee and have a hand in all the decisions his children make about their futures.

At five years old, West is told her two piece swimsuit is too revealing. “I didn’t know what modesty meant. I only knew I had done something wrong, that something must be wrong with the small band of skin showing at my middle. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember trying to put the guilt into the swimsuit, as if it were evil somehow, as if it had tainted me, those flimsy pieces of stretchy fabric.”

During family worship, West’s father reminds his children that all human beings are “born depraved and deserving of hell. … ‘What are people who aren’t saved?’ He would say. ‘Dead,’ we’d respond with confidence.”

Reading is Thinking

An interesting structural element of the memoir is the frequent placement of quotes from various literature that affected West’s formation. These include ads from Patriarch magazine, didactic Christian novels for children, adult books about how to be a subservient Christian wife, but also (less frequently) books like The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, which shows a girl breaking the rules of a restrictive society.

Patriarch magazine (tagline: equipping men to be godly leaders in family, church, and society) has an outsized influence over the way West is raised. West notes some article titles such as “The Loving Art of Spanking” and “My Child Does Not Belong to the State.”

Patriarch magazine also has a series of articles called “God’s Design for Scriptural Romance.” The author, John Thompson, gives detailed instructions for a father-controlled courtship process. These include “five fundamental principles of scriptural romance.” These are piety, patriarchy, purity, preparedness and patience. The four stages to marriage are friendship, courtship, betrothal, and wedding. None of these include falling in love. Having any sort of romantic feelings (much less any physical contact, including holding hands) before betrothal is considered a sin and a failure. West’s father will follow this courtship process in selecting mates for his kids.

Ignorance Doesn’t Result in Bliss

West’s parents hope to keep her from sex, drugs, and non-Christian media. She doesn't have an email account. She learns general knowledge in homeschool (not evolution, of course) as well as sewing and cooking. She is more isolated than protected. A fellow homeschooler sets up activities to help her get out of the house, seeing how unhealthy her life is. At one point, West’s father conducts ‘church’ at home because he is unhappy about his elder daughter almost eloping with a man she worked with. After the period of home church, the family attends Reformation Church (an Orthodox Presbyterian Church) under the direction of Kevin Swanson.

He said women who didn’t submit to their husbands were disobeying God. He said homosexuality was an abomination. He said women’s calling was to be helpers to their husbands, that self-serving careers would be sinful. He said the ‘homosexuals’ were on the march with an aggressive agenda. He said it was okay for children to be bruised during spanking because bruises don’t last forever.

West’s worry that she is not a real Christian and her fear of displeasing her father leads to an obsessive-compulsive disorder and an eating disorder. She worries about how her dress and actions might appear to men. She is raised to consider one future: wife and mother. Thus, she needn’t go to college. While she and her brother (who is a closeted gay young man) express doubts about their belief, when they come of age, they join the church.

Out of Control Controlling Behavior

When she is an adult, West’s father reads her letters and emails to and from potential future husbands to make sure there’s nothing romantic or overly emotional in them. In fact, West is not allowed to feel any kind of love or affection for potential mates as they are auditioning (the best way I can describe it). Her father picks and then decides against more than one guy. One is too Baptist and doesn’t believe in infant baptism, but West has no feelings for him anyway. One is a closeted gay man that West feels love for. Her father tells her it’s disobedient to allow her emotions to be out of control. The young man moves away and the courtship is ended. It appears to West that her father will never find her the right mate. It appears to the reader that he is only playing a game and that his real intention is to keep her in his home permanently as a cook and house cleaner, as a caretaker. The only thing that West is allowed to do to make her own money is teach piano lessons. She is an adult with no more authority over herself than a small child.

Eventually, West decides to take action and asks David, a man she sees in church, to hang out. David asks West’s father if he may court her. At first the answer is yes and then it is no. But West is smitten. She finally defies her father, creating her own happiness. At that point, she is 25 years old. (Yes—yikes!!)

This, of course, isn’t the end of West’s troubles. Her father is angry and they become estranged. Her own mental health issues, now including PTSD, are ongoing. The memoir continues to detail how she manages a life on her own, outside of the church.

High school housekeeping

There’s a good deal in Rift that would benefit any student who has experienced trauma through high-control situations, especially high-control religions. However, the beginning of the book might be off-putting for some as it discusses the geology of West’s landscape. This gives the book a literary feel, but it’s a slow opening for a teen (nice for adults). If students want to read about escape from Christian patriarchy and the ‘stay-at-home daughter’ movement, librarians could give them a little background on the geology-author’s life connection during reader’s advisory.

Something avid readers will love are the discussions of books that are interspersed with West’s Story. They show how her parents were controlling her reading in order to control her thinking. But when she has the chance to read books with female protagonists escaping their confining environments, she takes lessons for her own life. Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is one of the first to help her imagine freedom.

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Part 2

Cult Issues

As my book launch gets closer, I’ll be including news about cults and cult-like groups (‘cultish’ a...