for my own sake, im not doing a full review of this book. i grew up AFAB in an extremely right-wing christian family, and those are experiences i very much dont want to relive while writing a review.
don’t take that to mean i dont like this book, genuinely i think it’s incredible and it hit very hard. i have family who was into the gothard shit, i grew up around some of the beliefs Tia discusses being prevalent. i’m incredibly grateful that she wrote this.
i could go into more detail, but a lot of it are things i dont want to ruminate on, so i’ll leave you with this: the day all the right-wing ideals and conservative idealogy began to crack for me was when i was about 11. my parents let me have a national geographic subscription (i was extremely into science), and in one of the issues was a picture of people celebrating in washington DC the day queer marriage was legalized in america. i pulled the magazine out when i was alone one day and stared at the picture, and just thought “they don’t look evil. they look happy.”

this book is hard to read and has a vast amount of triggering topics, so read at your own discretion. i’ve tried to include the major ones below, but there are almost definitely more.