Rating: Four Stars

Minnow Bly is scared, alone and mangled. But she’s finally out of the cult.

The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oaks opens with Minnow Bly having just pummeled a random stranger into a pulp after escaping the Kevinian cult where the Prophet—the cult leader—had everyone brainwashed into thinking that other races were possessed by Satan, the outside world is evil and that God is a little boy named Charlie.

When the police get to the crime scene to find Minnow sitting by the man she assaulted, her boots covered in blood, they immediately take her into custody. When she gets to the detention center she meets some very interesting people and learns to adapt to a new life. At first it’s hard for her to accept that just about everything she had been taught growing up was a lie, but, with the help of a few friends, she eventually starts learning about the real world.

Right from the beginning, the book is filled with action and excitement, which made it hard to put down, and the amount of detail was amazing. In pretty much all books, the more detail the better. I like being able to picture a scene in my head, and reading about how a father cuts off his daughter’s hands with an ax took my reading experience to a whole new level. When reading that specific scene my hands physically ached just imagining my hands laying beside me on the ground like Minnow’s did, as blood spurted out of her stumps with each heartbeat. Though the amount of details at times made me nauseous, I absolutely loved it. Most authors I’ve read try not to go too far with violence and gore, but Oaks definitely pushes the envelope, which was new and exciting.

The plot was exciting, the characters were extremely realistic and it gave me some insight to the mind of a cult member. The only thing I didn’t like about the 396-page novel was the cliff-hanger ending. When I reach the end of a book, I like to have closure and I didn’t get that with this book.