Review by Booklist Review
When Kadlec watched armed insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, she didn't wonder about the ideology and culture that had led to such behavior. Raised in a devout evangelical home in the rural Midwest, Kadlec was as fulfilled by her connection to Jesus as she was committed to studying scripture with fellow believers. Unfortunately, her upbringing was also marked by a toxic culture of conformity, submission to men, and a near-complete lack of empathy for human struggle. The ideals of the evangelical "American dream"--religious purity, the heteronormative nuclear family unit, and the ability of all God's creatures to pull themselves up by the bootstraps--defined Kadlec's evangelical experience, and in this book Kadlec blends memoir and cultural criticism to call out the hypocrisy of it all. Brilliant and well-read, Kadlec braved the emotional tides of religious trauma, divorce, and coming out as queer all before her thirtieth birthday. Giving a voice to past and present evangelicals who know that there is so much more than a rural zip code that informs the size of religion's role in day-to-day life, Kadlec also invites readers to hold a mirror to the evangelical-political hydra that threatens to overthrow true American freedom.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman reckons with the religious trauma of her upbringing and embarks on a process of self-discovery in this searing debut. Growing up in the late 1990s rural Midwest in a family devoted to the evangelical church, Kadlec led a life defined by faith, from playing the part of pious daughter to marrying the pastor's son in 2011 and accepting the role of dutiful wife. Entering a marriage "intrinsically tied" to faith soon proved dysfunctional, even abusive, as Kadlec began to see how inextricable the lies and the indoctrination of her faith were to her understanding of the world: "to question how worthlessness, shame, and control were supposed to sit side by side with a belief in unconditional love would have been to question the foundation on which I had built my entire life." When the unreconciled trauma of her past--including years of volatile manipulation and a physical assault by a gang of boys in her youth group--fomented a radical revelation, followed by a fraught divorce, Kadlec set out to reclaim her selfhood, her sexuality, and to relearn to love and trust, eventually meeting her girlfriend, a fellow ex-evangelical. As she recounts her disentanglement from religion, Kadlec weaves a deeply personal narrative with excoriating criticism to unpack the ways in which religious belief is sewn into the fabric of American society. The result provides a poignant story of being born again in a secular world. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a memoir of discovery and unlearning, a Midwest girl finds religious freedom on the East Coast. Veering from scholarly and self-assured to angry and doubtful, Kadlec chronicles her experiences being raised by evangelical Christians and her subsequent deconstruction and rebuilding of everything she thought she knew about herself. Opening with her trip to the county courthouse where she filed her divorce papers, the author doesn't try to surprise us with shocking twists or turns. Instead, Kadlec tells us the story of her life so far in bits and pieces, interspersed with graduate-level research. This approach along with accounts of her childhood that never seem to go as deep as they could combines in a narrative technique that sometimes feels like it is meant to keep readers at arm's length. The researched pieces--about the origins of evangelicalism, the 1990s explosion of purity culture, and the roots of misogyny and racism in the church--are fascinating, but more interesting is Kadlec's personal journey. She grew up and out of evangelicalism but not before she was taught to hate her body, endured a disastrous marriage, and found her relationship with Jesus much more fraught than her younger self would have thought possible. Traveling from Iowa to Wisconsin as a child with her family, Kadlec was sure that college was her "ticket out…a guarantee I wouldn't end up like my mom: stuck in a nowhere town, financially trapped in a no-good marriage with a man who provided for you but didn't appreciate you." However, the author discovered that higher education was "only another example of liberal America's and academia's own cruel optimism, where what is given financially, energetically, emotionally, and even physically, so overwhelmingly, and so often, exceeds the actuality of what is received." Ultimately, Kadlec found peace in Brooklyn and acknowledgement of her true identity as a queer woman. Both memoir and thesis, this book highlights a cultural, social, and spiritual journey that will resonate with many. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
