Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs

Today’s post is on Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs by Rachel Jeffs. It is 282 pages long and is published by Harper Collins. The cover is a picture of the author with her father with the title in between them. The intended reader is someone who is interested in the FLDS, escape narratives, and abuse survivors. There is some mild foul language, sexual abuse and discussions of sexual abuse, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

Blurb from ebook- In this searing memoir of survival in the spirit of Stolen Innocence, the daughter of Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed Prophet of the FLDS Church, takes you deep inside the secretive polygamist Mormon fundamentalist cult run by her family and how she escaped it.
Born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rachel Jeffs was raised in a strict patriarchal culture defined by subordinate sister wives and men they must obey. No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader Warren Jeffs—Rachel’s father.
Living outside mainstream Mormonism and federal law, Jeffs arranged marriages between under-age girls and middle-aged and elderly members of his congregation. In 2006, he gained international notoriety when the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted List. Though he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, Jeffs’ iron grip on the church remains firm, and his edicts to his followers increasingly restrictive and bizarre.
In Breaking Free, Rachel blows the lid off this taciturn community made famous by John Krakauer’s bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven to offer a harrowing look at her life with Warren Jeffs, and the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered. Sexually assaulted, compelled into an arranged polygamous marriage, locked away in "houses of hiding" as punishment for perceived transgressions, and physically separated from her children, Rachel, Jeffs’ first plural daughter by his second of more than fifty wives, eventually found the courage to leave the church in 2015. But Breaking Free is not only her story—Rachel’s experiences illuminate those of her family and the countless others who remain trapped in the strange world she left behind.
A shocking and mesmerizing memoir of faith, abuse, courage, and freedom, Breaking Free is an expose of religious extremism and a beacon of hope for anyone trying to overcome personal obstacles.

Review- An engaging but horrifying memoir about surviving a cult. Rachel Jeffs was the first child born to Warren Jeffs and his second polygamous wife, as such she was raised in household where she knew that she was going to be one of many wives. When her father started to abuse as a young child, Jeffs was shocked that a holy man would do that. Her entire childhood was about being abused and trying to avoid her father so that she would not be abused. Then he placed her as a third wife to a man and she hoped her life would get better but her father’s love of control continuing to rule everything. Jeffs is very honest about what happened to her over the course of her life; from the sexual abuse of her father to being a disliked wife in a polygamous marriage and then her will to have her children and escape. It was hard to read at times with some of the details of her life and the abuse, not just sexually but of power that Warren Jeffs had over all the followers of the FLDS. But her story is worth reading to see from the inside what was going on and seeing her survive was moving and uplifting.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library’s ebook resource.