Books about cults are for boys now too!

Eden West

Pete Hautman

310 pages

Copy: Publisher review copy

Read: April 2015?

Spoilers: not many

Recommend to: Conundrum, really. I think teen boys would like it, but not sure I could convince them to buy it. Adults who like novels about cults, perhaps?

There's a surprising number of books about teenagers dealing with cults. The first I read was The Rapture of Cannan, the intended audience being somewhat of a mystery to me (I read it when I was fifteen and it worked out; reading it as an adult, it feels simply written, and about a teenager, so perhaps it was YA before YA was a thing?). Then there's tell-all memoirs about escaping cults; new semi-dystopias like Vivian Apple at the End of the World and the upcoming The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (reviews to come). But the shared glaring similarity: they're always told from the point of view of an oppressed female narrator, the cult standing in for a less subtle and more brutal version of the patriarchy at large. Men, especially the younger ones, tend to be weaker than the women.

Eden West breaks this mold with panache and grace. Set in the depths of Montana, a large and self-sufficient cult controls an equally large tract of land. Reaching their rumored end-times, the cult has begun to follow their religion with greater stringency, while being approached on all sides by potential threats to their mode of life. Hautman balances the warring halves of a young man's soul: the firm believer who wishes to follow his family and his community into never-ending paradise and an intelligent and curious mind provoked into deeper questioning by changes in his community and in his surroundings. While the nagging trope of a manic pixie dream girl variant is one of the catalysts that pushes him forward, Jacob, the narrator, is still a well-rounded character. He makes mistakes, makes poor choices, makes good ones, and suffers under the pull of hormones. Interlaced within the story are moments of true poetic and mystic prose: the encounters with a large wolf are particularly well written. 

It is a novel worth reading, which is why it is a shame that it is not one that can be easily recommended. I believe the adults who might like it would be turned off by the YA label, while the young men who might also enjoy it would be taken-aback by the subject matter. Hautman has written an interesting and mold-breaking novel; it's a pity that it may fail to gain the attention it deserves.

Crossposted: Children of an Idle Mind, Librarything