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Craig Borlase, Jill Duggar, Derick Dillard: Counting the Cost (2023, Gallery Books) 4 stars

Bonus points for Jill doing the reading for the audiobook.

4 stars

This was a shameless gossip read for me, I'll admit it. My mom was obsessed with the Duggars and their show and would always have it on in the background. Something about it always gave me a bit of the ick so I never watched it with her, but I remember enough about what was going on in some of the episodes so I figured I would give this a read because I like to support people that break the cult cycles of their families.

Hearing the way that she was raised by her parents to always be under her dad's thumb resounded heavily with me due to being raised in a religious family that wanted me to be a good little submissive housewife for someone in the future, and they weren't even involved in anything more than a standard religion. I am really glad that she references that the only reason they have been able to solidly move forward and get to where they are is due to working heavily with a therapist.

I know she said this wasn't meant to be a dirty tell-all, and there is noticeably quite a bit of information left out, but she still needs to protect her peace and she is still hoping to try to be able to have a relationship with her family at some point (on her own terms, obviously), so I can understand why she would not want to get into the deep conversations more and just kind of brush over them.

If you didn't know the show growing up, I don't really know how much this would interest anyone. But for those that are interested in learning more about different cults, she puts a good amount of information on that in the pages. So I can't say I would really recommend it, but if either of those would interest you, I think it'd be a decent read.