Books like Born into the Children of God — picked by fans

It was a brilliant decision on Natalie's part to create a graphic novel that lays out the many facets and layers that make up the dynamics of cults. It has been a pleasure for me to get to know Natalie. A former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she is now a dynamic and independent individual. This graphic novel explores a wide variety of aspects of the tactics used by Jehovah's Witnesses, including shunning, the reasons why cult family members will disavow non-cult family members, and a great deal more. This seemed to me to be an excellent option for storytelling geared for minds that have a tendency to gravitate toward visuals.

The very first time I got my hands on this book, I read it in its entirety. It was the visuals that drew me in. It was almost as though the novel that inspired the Hulu series and the pages of the graphic novel were one and the same thing. It is one of the items in my book collection that I cherish the most.

When my teenaged granddaughter picked up this book, she also read it in a single sitting. While I was milling about the house, I looked in the living room and saw that she was completely absorbed in its pages. This graphic novel tells an engrossing story, and whether you are a collector of all things GN or enjoy reading graphic novels, adding this book to your collection is an absolute necessity.

I had the privilege of spending some time with Dr. Lalich, and during that time I found her to be witty, funny, and extremely interested in the experiences of children who were raised in cults. As someone who grew up in a cult, I am grateful that she spent the time to concentrate on the children, as they are the ones who almost always fare the worst. This book chronicles the lives of several people who were raised under the sway of repressive religions. I am honored to be one of those people.

Dr. Lalich conducted the first in-depth study of its kind, conducting interviews with sixty-five individuals who were either born into or raised in thirty-nine distinct cultic groups spread across more than a dozen countries. Many of these individuals eventually made the decision to leave the cultic lifestyle on their own, which is something that is very unique… show more.

In this novel, which is set in the late 1970s, the protagonist, Celena, is abducted by two extremist women who are members of the Synanon cult. She would later find out that one of those women was her mother, whom she had not seen for more than two years at the time of the kidnapping. The culture of Synanon was one of abuse and deviation. This book packs a punch, and its story is an important one in the ongoing battle against cults that recruit parents to give over their children under the guise of improving their quality of life.

The accounts of survivors of the troubled teen industry are extremely upsetting due to the cultic practices of the industry, which include shunning, abuse, the use of forced labor, sexual assault, and more. It is essential to place a hold on this book because it provides one of the most… show more.

This is a fascinating, culturally urgent, eye-opening read.

Drawing on her firsthand experience in the Children of God cult, Young examines how cult dynamics have embedded themselves into mainstream American life. From Tony Robbins to Taylor Swift fandom, she reveals how belonging, identity, and promises of transformation are repackaged for the mainstream.

The research is thorough, the insights sharp, and the question she poses, "Are you in a cult?" will stay with you. 

From an evangelical Christian perspective, this reference work covers a wide range of topics via short, easy-to-understand, fact-based, and information-packed essays that range from just a paragraph to several pages. It’s an excellent research tool to which I contributed several essays. Some of the best researchers, scholars, and experts in the field of world religions were part of the large editorial team that produced this benchmark work.

I picked this book up at a used bookstore because I loved the blurb. It did not disappoint. In fact, it inspired me to write because I wanted to make people feel the same way I felt when I finished it—like something had changed forever.

I was particularly impressed with its diversity and the stretch her imagination was able to take, and I wanted to do that. I wanted to dream and write about things that hadn’t happened yet in real life. 

Kizzia’s prose and reporting are unequaled, but this dark, Gothic tale is hard to read because of the real-life horror it exposes. The Pilgrim family came to Alaska in 2002, wrapping themselves in fundamentalist Christianity and fighting with the federal government like true pioneers in the wilderness—they became a cause for the right because of how they seemed to fulfill Alaska’s frontier myth. But it turned out the patriarch of the family had created a weird prison of rape and abuse for his uneducated children, which Kizzia was able to get inside with vividly told scenes. And that truth tells us even more about Alaska, which has the worst rate of rape in the nation and a shocking level of child abuse. 

A science fiction novel that has as much focus on fleshed-out character development as the science? Amazing. The plot of this fascinating novel, even more so. Imagine a world where all the stars you see in the night sky suddenly go out. How would you react when you learned the reason for this was a world-spanning barrier which is not only blocking out the starry night but is also vastly increasing the rate at which time passes beyond the barrier—to the point where the sun ages billions of years in a matter of decades.

From exploring the implications of this time-bending device to witnessing the world as it copes with this new reality, this is one story that—after reading it decades ago—still holds a fond place in my heart.

Release the Kraken! While the tentacles might be more subtle on newer editions of this fine book, the title alone is enough to get it added to my list. This is a classic and the twists and turns in it are stupendous. What hooked me from the beginning was the characters and the story arc, although the plot, setting, and everything else make this a book you cannot miss. A must-read.