One Woman’s Escape from a Cult
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This is the story of Catharine (Rin), a 28-year-old woman who escaped from a cult at 18. As the book opens, she gets an email from a journalist, Reese Campbell, asking about a defunct cult in Florida that he has been investigating. Of course, that is the cult her father started and from which she escaped with intimate knowledge of all that transpired there.
Her only reason to respond to Reese is that she does not know – and dearly wants to know – if her “sister”, Linna, also managed to escape. She has reason to hope that this is the case because Reese claims to have a credible source. He alludes to the fact that this person is female. Additionally, there is an author Catharine has come across – Marion Earl – who writes stories that feel very close to home. Is Marion Earl Linna? And if yes, where is she?
And so, Catharine cooperates with Reese, planning to tell him as little as possible while trying to get at his source. Her closely held secrets? She plans to hold those tight.
As she says, there is a cliché about such cults that also happens to be true: It all seemed beautiful and wonderful and safe and harmless. Until it wasn’t.
The book’s chapters alternate between Now and Then. In the Now chapters, Reese and Catharine play a cat and mouse game with each other in a manner that is typical of books of this nature. In the chapters about Then, we learn about the cult from day one when she, her mom, and dad moved to a big farm in Florida.
There was a period of time when dozens of people were living at the farm with new families arriving weekly. In that time period, Linna and her mom moved in. From the start, the girls were pseudo sisters. They became step sisters as Rin’s father divorced her mother and married Linna’s mom instead.
As time went on lots of people made an exodus from the farm and by the time Rin was 18, only eight people remained. Linna, her mom, and Rin’s mom all had misgivings about the goings on at the farm. In particular they questioned the cleansing fasts her father enforced there.
But Rin kind of liked the fasts and could see beauty in them: “I thought of how good that first family meal after a moderation fast tasted, how much more I appreciated every bite and flavor. It wasn’t just another meal, but something earned and deeply satisfying, a small glimpse into how good all of life would feel one day, if only we put in the work first.”
It should be noted that Rin was always looking for her dad’s approval. And perhaps her falling in line with all his beliefs was her method to find it.
The cherry on top of their relationship was when he called her Little One. He certainly knew how to manipulate her with this endearment and he used it along with other means as he tried to mold her into a little version of himself. Little One indeed.
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Click here to learn more about Little One on Amazon.
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