Review Detail

Faking Faithby Josie Bloss is like the website Homeschoolers Anonymous in novel form. It tells the story of a teenage girl from Chicago named Dylan who faces high school hell after a sexting incident. In her despair, Dylan becomes obsessed with fundamentalist homeschooled bloggers, and most especially a blogger named Abigail. After starting her own blog using the pseudonym “Faith”, Dylan is eventually invited to Abigail’s farm for a two-week vacation where she gets a whole new type of education.

Faking Faith never mentions the Advanced Training Institute by name, but ATI is written all over Abigail’s life. At seventeen and a half, her formal education is complete and she prepares for life as a professional “stay-at-home-daughter”, or else must submit to whatever husband her father chooses for her, whether that be the boy next door, or a creepy twenty-eight year old molester.

In addition to showing all the negatives, Bloss does an awesome job depicting the seductive nature of the ATI lifestyle. To Dylan as the outsider, she’s a bit jealous of Abigail’s family dinners, well-behaved siblings, and the fact that Abigail’s parents are concerned about guarding Abigail’s heart and making sure she doesn’t fall in love with the wrong person.

I loved Faking Faith so much that I read it start to finish in one day. Half way through my mind started churning with all the people who should know about this book: R.L. Stollar at Overturning Tables, Jerry at Hersey in the Heartland–the entire Recovering Grace community. If I was Josie Bloss’s publicist I would mail out a case of copies to Homeschoolers Anonymous and let them distribute at will.

Every time I turn on my computer it seems I see another news article about how “cute” and wonderful the Duggars are. Nobody mentions the dark side. A while back I wrote an article on my blog called: “What ordinary moms should know about the Bill Gothard Scandal.” Josie Bloss has shared that same information in novel form. Faking Faith is brilliant.