Book Review: When the World Didn't End

 

When the World Didn't End

A Memoir

by Guinevere Turner

Pub Date 23 May 2023 

Crown Publishing,Crown

Biographies & Memoirs

Crown Publishing and Netgalley have provided me with a copy of When the World Didn't End for review:

The world was supposed to end on January 5, 1975. In accordance with strict instructions, six-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited with her community for salvation-a spaceship that would transport them to Venus. However, the spaceship never arrived.

Guinevere was unaware that her family was a cult. Living on a compound in Kansas, she lived apart from her mother with dozens of other children who worked in the sorghum fields and roamed freely through the surrounding pastures, eating mulberries and tending to farm animals. This bucolic existence, however, had a dark side. Mel Lyman, a self-proclaimed savior committed to isolation from a world he declared had lost its way, led the Lyman Family, a secluded cult led by Ginevere. A few days later, Guinevere was traveling with the inner circle among Los Angeles, Boston, and Martha's Vineyard communities when she caught the attention of Jessie, the woman everyone in the Family called the Queen.

Before long, Guinevere's life came to an end. Guinevere and her four-year-old sister were forced to leave the Family with their mother, whom she had been separated from since age three. After traveling outside her enclosed life, Guinevere was thrust into public school for the first time, a stranger in a strange land wearing homemade clothes, and clueless about social codes. In the world she had been raised to believe was evil, she faced challenges and horrors she could not have imagined.

A memoir based on the diaries she kept throughout her childhood, Guinevere Turner tells the story of a childhood shaped by extraordinary beauty and unfathomable ugliness, as well as the ache of longing for a home that was lost—and the slow realization of its harmful nature.

Five stars for When the World Didn't End!

Happy Reading!