Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Memoir delivered with humor to ease the pain & a heart full of forgiveness that brings hope

Shake that Cream: Battling Gods and Monsters in the Backwoods of East Texas by Ellen Black weaves the warp and weft threads of her past into a tapestry depicting an abusive childhood growing up in a dysfunctional household that joined Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God cult in the late 1950s as well as her lifelong quest to escape to normal.


 

Black chronicles events growing up in small-town Texas, attending Herbert W’s church and school. As a bonus negative, her father also taught at the school and knew her every move. Nowhere in her childhood did she receive affirmation, encouragement, or love. Yet, while she longed for it and lived in a sea of disappointment, she hung on to hope that somehow eventually her parents would love her.

When she goes away to college and graduates, she finally escapes the clutches of the church and her parents, but does she really? What happens when her racist parents learn she has a bi-racial child outside of marriage? They travel to New York City to kidnap her baby daughter and in a blink, the nightmare stands at her door again.

Shake that Cream is a moving, highly readable, firsthand account of what Black underwent being raised in the Worldwide Church of God cult. She articulates how Armstrong influenced her parents and so many others. While the details are disturbing, even as Black describes the abuse she and her brother suffered, this enthralling and harrowing memoir carries the reader on a journey of hope through a quagmire of false Christian doctrines, control, abuse, lies, anger, and more. Shake that Cream masterfully weaves Ellen’s story in a way that lays out her dire situation but doesn’t get mired in the negative. She tells her story from the first-person point of view and delivers it with enough humor to help ease the pain, and a heart full of forgiveness that brings hope. She not only escaped but survived with her sense of self intact and the toxic cycle broken.

I recommend Shake that Cream to the cult curious, those interested in secret societies, and false religions, and those trying to learn more about the Worldwide Church of God. I also recommend it to other survivors who have grown up with such physical and emotional pain and are trying to find their way to their own new normal. I award this book a strong four stars.

 

As Book Hookup, I am a longtime book reviewer, and I received a free review copy of this book and have not been compensated for reviewing or recommending it. This review is posted in collaboration with BookTasters. Some links in this post are affiliate links. We participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to amazon.com and affiliate sites.