The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly 
Stephanie Oakes 

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This is one of those books that I'm ecstatic to have a paper copy of. It'll join the others on my bookshelf of love. See, this is a rarity, reserved only for the books that I really, really took a liking too: five star books in my opinion. 

I picked The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly up at my local library's annual book sale. Five dollars buys you a bag of treasure; stuffed to the brim and ripping a little from the weight of your newly discovered gold. I bought six bags. 

Anyways, the copy I purchased and read is the unedited, unfinished editors proof so there may be slight variations between my reading experience and yours, but it's such a powerful read.

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“I could feel the window in which I viewed the world- no larger than a pinhole back then- broadening somewhere at the back of my mind just by looking at him.”

Minnow Bly and her family traveled to the middle of the woods when she was just a young girl, under the leadership of a prophet; to a new beginning. A beginning that would completely distort how she thought about the very world she lived in.  Meteors became bombs, shooting stars’ weapons of mass destruction, and stars the eyes of god.

"Fear floated around like constant pollen, but none of us were allergic." 

The prophet has been murdered, and the village set ablaze. Minnow finds herself in juvenile detention center and missing a lot more than just her hands. Will she ever be able to regain her freedom? To live a life with some type of normalcy away from the cult, and everything she's learned to be true? 

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I wasn't even five pages into the first chapter, and I knew this book was going to be a keeper. The text is easy to read, without being a cake walk, and the story unravels effortlessly. It is a longer read, with over 300 pages, but I absorbed every page to the fullest.

Rarely do I find myself "dog earring" a page or stopping to write a quote down, but there were just so many "ah-ha" moments in this book that I couldn't help myself. Definitely the type of story that makes you think and really evaluate how truly fortunate many of us are for the people and things we have in our lives. ​Things we often take for granted...like the ability to read. 

"Jude taught me what love was: To be willing to hold onto another person's pain. That's it." 

Thought provoking, entertaining and just an overall awesome read.