On My Radar:

Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times
by Flor Edwards
Turner Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

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 12 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.



From the Author
My memoir Apocalypse Child is about a girl (me) who grows up in an apocalyptic cult in Southeast Asia. She lives under the control of a dictator-like leader who controls his twelve thousand followers from his top-secret hiding place. Flor never sees the leader and grows up never knowing she will live to see adulthood. Instead, her future is painted with the promise of a lush heaven precluded by a torturous death because she is one of God’s chosen children who will save the world before the Great Apocalypse when she will be twelve years old. Despite the terror Flor faces, she manages to see beauty around her. But her life is once again jolted when the leader dies and Flor is thrust into the throes of mainstream society and left to make sense of it all.