Carolyn Jessop: Escape

What a fascinating and gripping read!It is absolutely unbelievable that sects like this "religion" can exist and that outsiders would not do anything about helping those that are caught inside!I am amazed at how people can be so brainwashed that they accept abuse like that! On the other hand I am in awe of Carolyn Jessop for doing what she did and for not giving up. However, I must admit that I cried when I discovered that her daughter Betty decided to go back!!!

In the closed world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, Carolyn Jessop was forced to obey her controlling husband's every demand. She had no money, no power and existed as one of six wives battling for her husband's attention. For seventeen years Carolyn suffered for the sake of her children. She tried to protect them as the cult's new leader, Warren Jeffs, started marrying girls off younger and younger. But when Carolyn discovered that her twelve-year-old daughter had spent three days at Jeffs' home, she knew she had to do everything in her power to take her children and flee. At 35 Carolyn escaped. This is her harrowing - and ultimately triumphant - story.

Margaret Cezair-Thompson: The Pirate's Daughter

It has taken me longer to get to read this book than I had planned! I started the book practically immediately, but at the beginning I found it hard to get into it. The storyline around Errol Flynn was interesting but rather tedious and long and so I struggled...However, there comes a point in the story where it got seriously gripping and where I was able to identify with the characters and then I could not put it down any more! The book has definitely got me interested in Jamaica's history and in Errol Flynn, too.


An unforgettable story of love and adventure, spanning three decades of Jamaican history. Jamaica, 1946. Errol Flynn washes up on in the Zaca", his storm-wrecked yacht. Ida Joseph, the teenaged daughter of Port Antonio's Justice of the Peace, is intrigued to learn that the 'World's Handsomest Man' is on the island, and makes it her business to meet him. For the jaded swashbuckler, Jamaica is a tropical paradise that Ida, unfazed by his celebrity, seems to share. Soon Flynn has made a home for himself on Navy Island, where he entertains the cream of Hollywood at parties that become a byword for decadence - and Ida has set her heart on marrying this charismatic older man who has singled her out for his attention. Flynn and Ida do not marry, but Ida bears Flynn a daughter, May, who will meet her father but once. The Pirate's Daughter" is a tale of passion and recklessness, of two generations of women and their battles for love and survivial, and of a nation struggling to rise to the challenge of hard-won independence.