The Book Daughter of Gloriavale – My Life in a Religious Cult
Author (s) Lilia Tarawa
Year 2017
What it says on the back cover
One young woman’s true story of growing up in Gloriavale Christian Community, the repressive cult lead by her grandfather, the charismatic and controlling Hopeful Christian.
In this personal account, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking secrets of the cult, with its rigid rules and oppressive control of women. She describes her fear when her family questioned Gloriavale’s beliefs and practices.
When her parents fled with their children, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice to stay or leave. No matter what she chose, she would loose the people she loved.
In the outside world, Lilia struggled to adapt. Would she be damned to hell for leaving? How would she learn to navigate this strange place called ‘the world’? And would she ever find out the truth about the criminal convictions against her grandfather?
What made me pick up this book
Who in New Zealand has often really wondered what goes on behind the scene in the Gloriavale Christian Community after watching those documentaries made for television about them? Who really has wondered if they are all that they seem, if they are sweetness and light and where everyone seems really happy, joyful and at peace with the world. Is it to good to be true? Is it a place where you will be loved and where the ‘whole world lieth in wickedness. and none of the people of this world love or obey God, but they follow instead their own lusts and fulfill the world of the devil’?
Lilia Tarawa in my eyes is a heroine. In fact each member of her immediate family should be commended for what they did. Born into a secret community that is cut off from the rest of the society would make anyone cringe and then to realise that what that secret community is doing and how wrong it is must have been a huge weight that rested on this family’s shoulders.
Told in first person narrative, Tarawa shares those intimate glimpses of how life was for her and for her family and a dear friend named Grace who came in from the world to act as a volunteer to the people of Gloriavale who was the subject of some terrible abuse from one of the people Tarawa loved.
Is this book worth buying
This book literally flew off the shelves when it was released, people like me wanted to know what really went on in that West Coast community. As I already have an extensive library I really toyed with the idea of purchasing the book but my library bet me to it and I was able to get it out without having the worry of buying it. Yes it would be worth purchasing it to re read it again at another time.
Tarawa includes snippets at the beginning of some of the chapters book that I assume is Gloriavale’s bible known as What We Believe giving us a precursor to what topic we will be reading about and it is neatly encased a tight weave of information that shows us not only how life was for Tarawa but how it was for others. Empathetic, articulate, kind and fun loving is how I would describe Tarawa as she also includes quotes on her own beliefs together with snippets from the very old and antiquated version of the King James bible.
You cannot help but feel her pain, her sorrow and her sense of fun. At times my mind drifted back to her interview when she was first interviewed on television when one of our local current affairs shows did a documentary on her grandfather and quite sometime before her and her family left the cult. I saw naivety in their faces, excited that they were going to be on television and a sense that they were just as curious about us as we were of them.
Quote
“You were taught the truth right from when you are young… watch that you don’t fall into the snares of the Devil”. Hopeful Christian to Lilia Tarawa, Chapter Four Uncertainty.
The documentary that had us wanting more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJKxZmbvS4
The Bookaholic Bookworm 