Tag: religious life

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: False Prophet

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After a podcast last week, I’m back with a Netflix documentary this week to make it two whole weeks in a row that I haven’t talked about theatre. Even though I did go to the theatre (twice) this week. I actually watched this the weekend that it came out last month – but this got caught behind the theatre posts in the queue because they were more time sensitive.

Trust Me: The False Prophet is a four episode mini-series following Christine Marie and her husband Tolga Katas who move to the Short Creek community in the hopes that they can help members of the FLDS community in the aftermath of the arrest and conviction of their leader, Warren Jeffs. Christine is a cult expert who has a fascinatingly varied prior life, Tolga is a videographer. Both are very much city people and get the sort of suspicious reception from the locals you might expect. But Christine is incredibly persistent and helps the women to start a shop to sell their products and make some money. But during the course of this they discover a new “prophet” is emerging from the chaos and vacuum that has been left by the absence of Warren Jeffs.

I’ve written previously about Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers Rulon and Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Mormon Church (and was made by the same director and executive producer) but after Warren Jeffs was imprisoned the community was left isolated and leaderless. Then Samuel Bateman appears in town with a group of wives – some of whom look to be underage and the community starts talking. Christine and Tolga decide that they’re going to try and find out what is going on and bring him to justice – and they’re going to film it as they do it. It’s astonishing. And what makes it even more astonishing is that Bateman approached them to make a documentary about him to help him spread his word – as in he thinks this is a good idea.

The big difference from Keep Sweet is that this has all of Tolga’s footage of the documentary that they were filming and so has all of the people that they are talking about in the documentary in their own words on camera at the time that it was happening. Including Samuel. I said in the post about Keep Sweet that the first parts of that were grimmer than I expected (and I was expecting that to be pretty grim) but I think having seen that gave me a really good background coming into this – and although this is pretty horrifying, ultimately it has a satisfying ending (or as satisfying as things can be in these circumstances) to their quest to help the young women that Bateman was marrying*.

I watched all of these episodes back to back in one sitting. I thought it was really well made and realy clever. I admired Christine and Tolga for what they were trying to do – and the nerves of steel that they showed while they were doing it. I have a few questions about the local police response, but that’s not about the documentary! And if you do watch this, this Guardian article from last week and this Hollywood Reporter profile of Christine Maire are interesting reading too.

Have a good Sunday.

*Spoiler: Samuel Bateman was sentenced to 50 years in prison in late 2024

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March Quick reviews

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Another month, another batch of mini reviews. I’ve already written about so many books this month, I was almost surprised that I had anything left to write about, and yet here are three more…

Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomons

Ari is a weather presenter at a Seattle TV station. Russell is one of the station’s sport reporters. Both of them are being driven mad by their bosses. Ari wants Torrence – the station’s star meterologist – to give her more mentoring but Torrence is too distracted by fighting with her ex husband – the station’s news director Seth. Russell wants off the college sports beat and onto pro sports, but Seth is paying too much attention to his fight with his exwife to take him seriously. After a disastrous Christmas party, Ari and Russell decide to team up to try and get Torrence and Seth back together. But over the course of their plan, the two of them end up spending a lot of time together too… I liked this a lot more than I liked the first book in the series – for some reason the romance in this just clicked for me. Ari and Russell make a great couple and each of them have valid reasons for avoiding relationships, but they work through them like sensible people (for the most part) rather than having dramatic Big Misunderstandings all the time. I also loved the fact that it had a Jewish hero and heroine – which is something I’d like to read more of! Lots of fun – would probably have been BotW if I hadn’t read Better Luck Next Time the same week.

With Love from Rose Bend by Naima Simone*

Owen is a former football player in hiding from the world after the accident that caused him to call time on his career. Leo is hiding from adult relationships by being constantly busy running her family’s business. Leo wants Owen to judge a contest at a town festival – but when she turned up at his house to ask him, she realises he’s the man she has a steamy one night stand with a year ago. And it gets slightly more complicated than that as a fake relationship element is added to the mix too. I’ve mentioned before that I like a sports romance and I also like a competent heroine and this ticked my noses in that front. Lovey weekend afternoon reading!

Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones

Now this is a weird one. I’ve included it here because I think some of you will have seen it on my lists and known exactly why I was reading it – my ongoing interest in weird religious stuff -and wondered why I haven’t written about it’s so now I am and here is your answer: it is brutal. It’s bleak. It’s filled with child abuse, child sexual abuse, sexual abuse, neglect. But it’s also not as well written as say Educated and I don’t think the author has really come to terms with what happened to her, so it doesn’t actually really get you anywhere or give you a takeaway at the end. So it ends up just being a lot of really grim abuse without as much breaking away from it as you want/expect/hope.

And that’s the lot – and I know that’s a bit of a downbeat note to end on, but I couldn’t make any other order of the reviews feel any better!

Book of the Week, memoirs, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Priestdaddy

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Staying in non-fiction for this week’s BotW – but this time moving to a memoir.  You’ll have noticed Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy on the WiB list for some considerable time – I actually started listening to it on audiobook, but it demands attention and with my long list of podcasts to listen to, I struggled to find time to make progress on it.  I discovered early on that I couldn’t listen to it while I was running because it made me laugh too much and put me at risk of tripping myself up.  So I got on the library hold list and waited for a copy to come in.  And when it finally did (this is a popular book people) I had much more success reading rather than listening to it.

Cover of Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Priestdaddy is Patricia Lockwood’s memory of her childhood, growing up moving around the Mid-West with an eccentric, doom-prophesying mother and her even more eccentric Catholic priest father.  Yes, you heard right.  Lockwood’s father underwent a religious conversion and felt called to ministry after he was already married with children, and then found a loop hole that meant the Roman Catholic church would receive him as a priest.  The book starts as Lockwood and her husband move back in with her parents after a medical procedure messes up their finances, and as she and her husband get used to living with the eccentric duo, she reminisces on the key moments of her childhood.

Lockwood’s father, Greg, is the biggest, flashiest character in this – he wears as few clothes as possible whenever he’s not on duty, he plays terrifyingly loud electric guitar and shouts along with action movies – but her mother manages steals the show for me a lot of the time.  She’s constantly expecting the worst to happen and seeing the worst, but managing everything, dealing with the madman that she married and loopy in her own way.  By the end of the book you feel like you understand her more than you do Greg.

This is funny and terrifying in equal measure.  It’s also beautifully written.  Lockwood is a poet and her words fairly sing on the page.  There are some weighty issues here – Lockwood is a lapsed catholic and looks back on her childhood – including an anti-abortion protest she was taken to – with a particular view on the world of 80s and 90s religious super-conservatism that she grew up in.  I really liked but I’d think hard about who I recommended it too – my sister, who loves reading about American Christianity in its many shades, yes; my mother, Church of England and formerly of the village’s church council and who went to a convent school probably not.

This was nominated for a whole bunch of prizes and found its way on to a lot of book of the year lists when it came out in 2017 and I’m not surprised.  As always I’m behind the curve with this – but I’m glad I caught up with it in the end.  And all this means that you should be able to get hold of a copy fairly easily.   As I said, I borrowed my copy from the library, but it’s out in paperback, Amazon has hardbacks at a reasonable price via third parties and you can get it in Kindle and Kobo.  And the audiobook I mentioned – is read by the author and is apparently exclusive to Audible.

Happy Reading!