The Book of Essie: A novel

This sucked me in. The premise was interesting and why I wanted to read the book, but the characters were the reason I kept reading. Essie is the youngest daughter of an evangelical family with a long-running reality TV show. After she becomes pregnant, her mother decides she must get married. Only Essie has a plan to escape her family, and draws in her would-be groom, Roarke, and a reporter who has herself escaped an evangelical past, Libby, into her scheme.

Told in three POVs, each character was compelling and I wanted to know more about each and also how they would collectively resolve everything. Essie, Roarke, and Libby all have secrets and have all been hurt personally by some brand of conservative evangelical Christianity. This show more book was the journey of them breaking free and escaping.

While the plot was obviously inspired by the Duggars, it still felt fresh. I loved this book. It was compelling and unsettling, and my mind is still reeling from it.

Content warnings: rape, incest, homophobia, child death, child sexual abuse

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via its First to Read program. show less

17-year-old Essie has lived her entire life so far in front of cameras; her family are the stars of a reality TV show that follows them both in the huge church her father preaches to and in their daily lives. She has felt trapped and her life has been dictated entirely by her mother, but recent events have given her hope that she may be able to find a way out...
Oooof, but this is a good one. Very seat-edgy, with twists that you can sort of see coming, but hold your breath for anyway, and with a strong, well-crafted, and important message woven into the suspense and thrills. I loved the complicated characters - and loved to hate some of them. Definitely recommended.

Essie's preacher father is the head of both his megachurch and his family, but it's Essie's mother who really runs the show. Literally. Essie's family stars in "Six for Hicks" a popular reality tv show focusing on their family and ministry. Essie's life has always come with cameras and production assistants. But her life isn't what millions of viewers might assume, and when a pregnancy test comes back positive, it's time for Essie to put in motion the plan she's been hatching for years to get herself out of the spotlight.

Essie is a great character. She's both determined and vulnerable, strong and nervous. She narrates her own story with a clear and convincing voice. Roarke, whose help she needs to get out, is also a great character, and show more his voice helps to make Essie's story fuller and more believable. On the other hand, Liberty Bell, the reporter to whom Essie entrusts her story, could have been the main character of her own book, but cramming her story into Essie's doesn't quite work, and she reads as more of a plot device than a fully-fleshed out character. Her presence is necessary, helping to illuminate parts of Essie's story that she couldn't give us on her own, but a simpler character, with less of a backstory might actually have served the novel as a whole better.

Still, with Essie's voice as the driving force of the narrative, this book is a success. I was rooting for Essie, and then for Essie and Roarke together, and was fully invested in their search to find the "right" path in a challenging situation.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review. show less

Seventeen year old Essie has grown up in public -- her father is an evangelical preacher, and her family has starred in a reality TV show since before she was born. But she wants out. She has a secret plan to make it happen.

This is utterly predictable YA that reads like second-rate Duggar fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, throwing in a mix of other hot button religious community stereotypes with their historical serial numbers also filed off (most prominently ex-gay camps, incest, regretted childhood memoirs, cults, and deadly standoffs with law enforcement). The characterization is weak, the plot is unrealistic, and the implicit lessons seem somewhat questionable.

But.... it's also incredibly gripping. I devoured this book show more faster than anything else I've read for months, and I kept going back to it in every spare moment I had. That's a pretty neat accomplishment for its author. The excellent pacing means I'll recommend it, though only to folks who are very forgiving of the usual weaknesses of YA as a genre. show less

Ooooooh, I love this book! If I could give it 6/5 stars, I would.

Seventeen year old Esther Hicks is the last child of Jethro and Celia Hicks, and one of the stars of the reality tv show, Six for Hicks, which follows Essie and her family through her father’s Evangelical ministry. But when a life altering situation threatens the family’s multi-million dollar livelihood, as well as Essie’s way of life, she concocts a plan that will not only set her up for life, but free her from the stronghold she calls her family. In order to make the plan work, she must convince complete stranger, 18-year-old Roark Richards to marry her, within the next couple weeks. Roark and his family will benefit tremendously if he goes through with this show more arrangement, but his own secret may take them all down.

On the surface, this book sounds easy-peasy and without much depth, but as the pages turn (and they will fly by), there is so much to this book it is hard to put into words. Fraught with undertones of evil, religion, family drama, sexual identity, and lies, Meghan MacLean Weir writes an absolutely beautiful story about love and motherhood, friendship, and justice.

The Book of Essie is written from three perspectives: Essie’s, Roark’s, and Liberty Bell’s, a journalist who unwittingly has more in common with Essie than many know.

The eloquent way Weir writes this book without vulgarity or harsh language and instead with grace, and honesty, one hardly knows they are actually reading about rape and incest.

So. Freaking. Good. Absolutely powerful.

*I listened to this book on Audible (which was fabulous) and before I finished it, I purchased the hardcover to keep in my personal library. show less

The last four pages cost this novel 2 stars, because the author explicitly inserted her agenda. It felt Ike she didn’t trust me as a reader to figure it out. I agree with the points that she was trying to make, but the beauty of fiction is that, when it is done well, the story shares the message.

was pretty much sold on the NetGalley blurb for this one: Teenage Esther Hicks is a daughter on a Christian family reality show… and also secretly pregnant.

Essie’s mother has turned her husband’s ministry and their family (including fertility struggles, premature babies, and now new daughters-in-law) into Six for Hicks, a popular reality show, a growing congregation and a substantial income. It’s hard not to see the Duggars in the growing brood of Christian reality TV stars and even in the language of courtship and publicly-performed service trips.

Essie has grown up with constant cameras on her, and readers can see how that’s affected her in a thousand ways. She doesn’t tell her mother that she’s expecting a baby, instead show more she fake-hides her pregnancy test someplace she knows her mother will find. Part of this story is just a fascinating look at lifestyle reality shows and an outwardly perfect family, and that alone would be a pretty great novel. But I was very quickly drawn in by the characters. Essie and her “fiance” Roarke are both realistic, complex teenagers in a wild and improbable situation, just trying to survive and still treat each other kindly.

While outwardly behaving as a faithful daughter and bride-to-be for the cameras and gossip-mongers, Essie decides to turn her secret journals into a tell-all, describing life as a Six for Hicks daughter and admitting the truth about her pregnancy. Journo/producer Liberty Bell, herself a former child of a survivalist cult and bestselling memoir author, may be able to tell Essie’s story to the world, but there are consequences to revealing the truth.

This was a rare novel in which I wasn’t sure how the story was going to end. (When one reveal was completely unsurprising to me, Liberty also sighed and asked why people have to be so predictable.) It was great because I wasn’t sure until the very end whether or not Essie would get married, or whether she’d release her book, and how things could go if she did one or both of these things. show less