Apocalypse Child
A Life in End Times
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be thirteen years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her. Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex. Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edwards grippingly chronicles her bizarre childhood within a California cult in her smart debut. Children of God was a movement founded in Huntington Beach in 1968 that claimed the Great Apocalypse was coming in 1993, the year Edwards would turn 12. Constantly on the move in part because her family thought it was their mission to warn the world, in part because they were running from the law for various reasons Edwards's parents were reassigned to a new location in Asia every few months, where they isolated Edwards and her siblings behind the high walls of compounds. Although her memoir mostly focuses on her life in the cult its senseless rules (only three squares of toilet paper allowed) and abusive methods like "flirty-fishing" (collecting a donation in exchange for sexual favors) the most memorable section comes when Edwards leaves the cult at age 12 after wearing down her parents and tries to forge a new life as a teenager in America. Torn between love for and fury toward her parents, she eventually discovers writing, an outlet that helps her sort through her confusion about her identity outside of the cult: "For the first time, I was getting to know myself." This is a wrenching testimony about a complicated childhood reclaimed.
