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The Cresswell Plot

Eliza Wass · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs

Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer · 438 pages

In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the lengths

CultsLarge FamilyToxic Family DynamicsChild Abuse
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The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

Stephanie Oakes · 406 pages

The Kevinian Cult has taken everything from seventeen-year-old Minnow: twelve years of her life, her family, her ability to trust. And when she rebelled, they took away her hands, too. Now their Prophet has been murdered and their camp set aflame, and it's clear that Minnow knows something about what happened that night. As she languishes in juvenile detention, she relives the events that led to

CultsForestChild AbuseYoung Adult
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Geek Love

Katherine Dunn · 355 pages

Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback O

Large FamilyCultsToxic Family DynamicsChild Abuse
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Nothing Holds Back the Night

Delphine de Vigan · 346 pages

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris me

Large FamilyToxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseDark
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Burned

Ellen Hopkins · 544 pages

NY Times bestseller, is the story of a young woman, struggling to find her place in the world in the face of abuse by the person she most adores: her father. She questions her family, her faith, and her ability to love and be loved. Suspended from school, she is sent to rural Nevada to live with an aunt whom she barely knows. There she finds love, acceptance and new knowledge about the things t

Large FamilyToxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung Adult
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Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

Tom Kizzia · 322 pages

Documents the story of Robert "Papa Pilgrim" Hale and the antiestablishment family settlement in remote Alaska that was exposed as a cult-like prison where Hale brutalized and isolated his wife and fifteen children.

CultsToxic Family DynamicsLarge FamilyChild Abuse
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Shiver

Maggie Stiefvater · 437 pages

In all the years she has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house, Grace has been particularly drawn to an unusual yellow-eyed wolf who, in his turn, has been watching her with increasing intensity.

ForestToxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung Adult
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Foxlowe

Eleanor Wasserberg · 316 pages

"An astonishing literary debut about a young girl's coming of age in the haunting, enchanting world of an English commune -- a modern gothic novel with echoes of Room and Never Let Me Go. Foxlowe is a crumbling old house in the moors -- wild, secluded, and magical place. For Green, it is not just home, but everything she knows. Outside, people live in little square houses, with unhappy families an

CultsChild AbuseDarkFirst Person Narrator
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Hazelthorn

C.G. Drews · 358 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsForestYoung AdultDark
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The Thirteenth Child

Erin A. Craig · 498 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsLarge FamilyDarkYoung Adult
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Barely Breathing

Rebecca Donovan · 592 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung AdultDark
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The Sound of Gravel

Ruth Wariner · 352 pages

The true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist family. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world

CultsLarge FamilyChild AbuseFirst Person Narrator
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The Talk-Funny Girl

Roland Merullo · 304 pages

Raised by parents so intentionally isolated that they speak their own hybrid dialect, abused youth Marjorie witnesses her parents' submission to a sadistic cult leader before she is rescued by another abuse survivor who teaches her stoneworking skills.

CultsChild AbuseDarkFirst Person Narrator
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The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Carrie Ryan · 310 pages

ForestCultsYoung AdultDark
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Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

Jenna Miscavige Hill, Lisa Pulitzer · 416 pages

Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, goin

CultsToxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseDark
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Seed

Lisa Heathfield · 342 pages

Pearl has grown up in a commune with several women and two men. She has no idea which ones are her real parents. When she gets her period for the first time it means she will be old enough to be chosen and bear a child with one of the two adult males. They worship Nature and depend on it to provide for them. When a new family arrives, Pearl grows close to the new boy, Ellis, who fills her with sto

CultsYoung AdultDarkFirst Person Narrator
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Such a Pretty Girl

Laura Wiess · 224 pages

Haunted by flashbacks, fifteen-year-old Meredith learns that three years in prison has not changed the abusive father who molested her.

Toxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung AdultDark
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Allegedly

Tiffany D. Jackson · 400 pages

When Mary, a teenager living in a group home, becomes pregnant, authorities take another look at the crime for which Mary was convicted when she was nine years old.

Toxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung AdultDark
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The Darkest Child

Delores Phillips · 392 pages

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve an

Large FamilyToxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseDark
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The Family Upstairs

Lisa Jewell · 464 pages

Jewell has a way with the quietly creepy subgenre of domestic suspense. Her books, this one included, often rely on the kind of passive spying we do on our neighbors and loved ones—the kind of spying that uncovers unsettling secrets. In this book, the heroine, Libby Jones, has reached her twenty-fifth birthday and thus learns what her long-dead parents left to her: a house in London’s chichi Kensi

CultsChild AbuseDarkFirst Person Narrator
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Raven

V.C. Andrews · 192 pages

Raven's life goes from bad to worse when her mother is arrested and sent to a rehabilitation center, and she is forced to go live with her abusive Uncle Reuben and his family.

Toxic Family DynamicsChild AbuseYoung AdultDark
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Fourth of July Creek

Smith Henderson · 480 pages

"After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times. But as Pete's own

Toxic Family DynamicsCultsChild AbuseDark
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Missing

Kelley Armstrong · 384 pages

The best thing about being a teen in Reeve's End is that I'll be able to leave soon. Like my best friend did. Like my sister did. Most of us go. There's nothing here but abandoned mines and an empty future. I'm better off taking my chances elsewhere. The only thing I'll miss is the Kentucky wilderness that has always been my refuge. But that changed the day I found Lennon. Left for dead, ble

ForestToxic Family DynamicsYoung AdultFirst Person Narrator
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Hard Truth

Nevada Barr · 336 pages

Park Ranger Anna Pigeon comes face-to-face with the dark side of humanity when she investigates the disappearance of three young girls in Rocky Mountain National Park.

CultsForestDarkThriller

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