This was a very good but very hard book to read. If you were pulled in by Educated, expect to be intrigued and horrified by Kin as well.

As she shares her life with us, the good and the bad, Shawna Rodenberg shines a light on the Vietnam era and the reactions of so many of the returning soldiers. Her parents made the decision to isolate their children from the turmoil that was playing out at every level in the United States, only to find there was no escape, bad people can be found everywhere you care to look. Faced with the difficult decisions that plague all parents, Rodenberg's family would return to their father's roots. There they would have the comfort of family to help through the hardships endemic to the mountain communities where poverty and lack of education were just two of the problems they faced. Rodenberg's memoir is an excellent example of life in this era.

I love memoirs and I often find them hard to rate, because how could I rate someone's life! This memoir sounding promising and I'm always interested in reading about people in Appalachia, but the story was choppy in parts and it was hard for me to follow and stay engaged. The story bounces around a bit and I wish the author would have just stuck to her own point of view. Not a bad memoir, but not something I would recommend.

A very personal and soulful account of a young girls account growing up in a dysfunctional home. I could identify with the character on some of the abuse angels except the sexual side. i could feel that she wanted family to be around her and encompass her into a cocoon.
However, the writing of the author tended to be discontinuous and incohesive. Which made it at times hard to follow. I have read other such memoirs that are better written and therefore make them more poignant and compelling. This book made it hard to keep reading and I had to put it down many times and i took many notes on the characters to keep track of who was doing what to whom.

I received a free advanced copy from NetGalley and these are my willingly given thoughts and opinions.

Shawna Kay Rodenberg's memoir takes you through her life story with an unflinching view of what it was like growing up in a family who followed a cult. Shawna's parents were always searching for a better life for their family whether they were living in a cult or moving back to Kentucky to work a series of jobs to take care of the growing family.
Shawna was sexually abused by a trusted man within the cult and this affected many aspects of her life. Her father built the house in Kentucky where the family lived.
Shawna shares with sometimes brutal honesty her life growing up and how the family adapted. The story is told in dual timelines and you get to see how her parents early lives led to the raising of their family.
This book left me encouraged by how the author overcame the struggles her family lived and became better for it.

When I first read the title of this memoir, I thought it sounded like a book about a girl who survived on the mountain. But it's so much more than that. It's about overcoming hardship and finding love—in family, in community, and in yourself.
Kin is a mesmerizing memoir of survival that seeks to understand and make peace with the people and places that were survived. It is above all about family-about the forgiveness and love within its bounds-and generations of Appalachians who have endured, harmed, and held each other through countless lifetimes of personal and regional tragedy.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg writes with such honesty and grace about her childhood in Appalachia that I can't help but admire her strength as well as her ability to forgive those who wronged her or failed to protect her. She takes us on a journey through a landscape where poverty is always present but hope is never far away.

i don't know, I'm just weary of memoirs like this. I'm one of those rare readers who didn't care for the last castle.
Just doesn't seem believable as to some of the recalled memories.

I love me a good religious fundamentalist memoir but this just wasn't it. A lot of the writing and storytelling fell flat for me.

Kin
By Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an advanced copy of this book

This was a hard read for me. I would read for awhile but then I would get distracted and put the book down again. I found myself picking up other books. I was really hoping it would get better because I was initially excited to read it but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

This one sadly missed the mark for me. The premise had so much promise, but the author skipped around frequently and shared insights from her own father's life but written as if she had experienced them. It also lacked any sort of natural flow, the stories almost appearing to be in a random order, making it harder to connect with the characters or form a timeline of the author's life and the events being described. I almost DNF'd this one.

I took my time a bit with this one. I read chapters and stories here and there, trying to feel a connection. I found the cult/religious part of this story interesting but I couldn't find a real good connection to it. The stories were difficult at times as the abuse and struggles were rough, but I still didn't feel the pull into the life and the connection with the narrator I'd been hoping for. I found the letters and some of the backstory a bit disjointing with the flow. I wish I'd liked it more.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

I was really excited for this one but wish it didn't jump around so much. After all the timeline jumps I was confused as to if events had already happened yet or not. It had high hopes and would have been a great memoir if it was just cleaned up some to be easier understood.

DNF
I tried to read this book a couple of times. I thought maybe the first time I just needed to read a different type of book. However, picking it up again, I found the book disjointed. I could not get into Shawna story. Typically, I enjoy memoirs.
Thank you @NetGalley and @BloomsburyPublishing for the advance readers copy for my honest review.

3 stars. *

I was intrigued by the blurb on this memoir and I am not sorry that I took the opportunity to read the digital ARC from NetGalley.

Kin is another "child of a weird religious cult" memoir. Shawna Kay Rodenberg grew up the first child of parents who became members of The Body, an extreme Pentecostal Evangelical sect group that was active primarily in the US in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is also the story of her push and pull against her family and her love/hate relationship with her father.

In many ways the story is underdeveloped and it simply ends, without any real completion or satisfaction. But I enjoyed her writing and I'd like to know more.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

DNF. I really wanted to give this book a good shot, because it sounded so interesting and like many memoirs that I love. However, this book needed an editor. It lacks structure, and felt all over the place.

As a person who was born and raised in Letcher County, Kentucky, I found the prologue very insulting. She was condescending to the area and most of the residents while stating how protective she was of it. I almost did not read the book because of it. But I did read the book and it was o.k. I felt that the chapters told from her mom and/or dad's perspective growing up here were a little suspect. How can you have a memoir and have chapters told by other people. Did they write those chapters or did she just write it based upon stories she had heard about their childhood?? SPOILER next so... She was sexually abused at The Body but that was never discussed in any real detail in the memoir but to me was probably the basis of much of her acting out and her feelings of being "bad" that she experienced throughout the rest of the book. Parts of the book were interesting but overall, I honestly feel like she is trying to capitalize off of the fame of the book Hillbilly Elegy by writing about Eastern Kentucky and painting it with all of the same stereotypical things that is always portrayed about the area (poverty, lack of education, abuse). There is a lot of poverty and drug abuse in Eastern KY but there is so very much more that is rarely ever shown or displayed in the books, movies or articles about the region. This is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Truly magnificent. Also, while there is poverty, there are also many that are living well. There are some amazing homes that would sell for several hundred thousand dollars in other areas. There are some of the most intelligent people that live her too. And the generousness of the area is second to none. The community here support each other both emotionally and financially when their neighbors are ill, grieving, etc. All in all, just a typical one-dimensional, slanted view book about the area and its people, including her parents

Thank you Netgalley for the e-book of Kin by Shawna Kay Rodenberg in exchange for my review.

Kin is a memoir by Shawna Kay Rodenberg who grew up in a strange religious cult called The Body. I am always down for a good memoir especially when cults are involved. This particular one though fell a bit flat for me. I wanted to like it more, but I found myself struggling to get through it at times.

Shawna grows up in Appalachia until her father sells off all their possessions, packs up the family and makes a move to Minnesota to join “The Body.” The Body is super religious cult that is off-the-grid and delivers harsh discipline for even the smallest misbehavior (some I wouldn’t even consider a misbehavior at all). There is also sexual abuse towards children, Shawna included, that occur and only come to light when the “leader” passes away. That’s when Shawna’s father packs up the family again and heads back to Appalachia.

This memoir is about Shawna’s life growing up in one world and then suddenly brought to live in this crazy religious world and back again.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.

DNF at 71 percent. I thought the premise (little girl raised in a weird religious cult and in the backwoods of Appalachia) sounded interesting. However, the scenarios were disjointed and sometimes went from one time period to another with no indication that the author had moved on from a previous experience. The inclusion of the family's history was interesting but the switching of point of view from young Shawna to her parents as children and teenagers was very hard to follow. I just found myself bored and not caring what happened to the protagonist even when the things that happened to her were scary or inappropriate.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy. This book was something I was really looking forward to reading. The premise is very interesting and unfortunate I would say for the author. The struggle with a dysfunctional family, growing up in a cult and trying not to succumb to the monotony is bravely penned down. There are a lot of family and generations mentioned which makes it hard to keep track of as a reader. There also is a lot of back and forth by the author during her flashbacks which again sort of takes you away from the main premise of the book. Overall is a story of resilience and strength which I greatly admire and so would recommend to other readers.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The subject matter was interesting to me but the number of flashbacks and the amount of meandering through the years became distracting after awhile. It felt like the author wasn't really sure what - or whose - story she was trying to tell and it needs more cohesion. Still, I'd recommend it, especially to anyone interested in fundamentalist cult survivors or life in Appalachia over the past 50 years.