Could not put it down ( )

Ooooooh, I love this book! If I could give it 6/5 stars, I would.

Seventeen year old Esther Hicks is the last child of Jethro and Celia Hicks, and one of the stars of the reality tv show, Six for Hicks, which follows Essie and her family through her father’s Evangelical ministry. But when a life altering situation threatens the family’s multi-million dollar livelihood, as well as Essie’s way of life, she concocts a plan that will not only set her up for life, but free her from the stronghold she calls her family. In order to make the plan work, she must convince complete stranger, 18-year-old Roark Richards to marry her, within the next couple weeks. Roark and his family will benefit tremendously if he goes through with this arrangement, but his own secret may take them all down.

On the surface, this book sounds easy-peasy and without much depth, but as the pages turn (and they will fly by), there is so much to this book it is hard to put into words. Fraught with undertones of evil, religion, family drama, sexual identity, and lies, Meghan MacLean Weir writes an absolutely beautiful story about love and motherhood, friendship, and justice.

The Book of Essie is written from three perspectives: Essie’s, Roark’s, and Liberty Bell’s, a journalist who unwittingly has more in common with Essie than many know.

The eloquent way Weir writes this book without vulgarity or harsh language and instead with grace, and honesty, one hardly knows they are actually reading about rape and incest.

So. Freaking. Good. Absolutely powerful.

*I listened to this book on Audible (which was fabulous) and before I finished it, I purchased the hardcover to keep in my personal library. ( )

I really thought I would like this book more than I did. It didn't unfold in as interesting a way as I thought it might - and was fairly predictable. I watched a lot about the familys in the news that this book takes inspiration from - and I feel like it could have been more daring - I also feel like the characters could have been better developed. I don't think it is characterized as YA but it felt a bit like some YA books that I have read. It would be a good book to read during travel. ( )

Just as she turns seventeen, Essie discovers she is pregnant. Because her family are stars of a hit reality show and her father is an evangelical preacher, how to handle this delicate turn of events becomes a complicated discussion between not only her family but the entire production team. While her mother scrambles to locate a suitable young boy to foist upon her in marriage, Essie quietly orchestrates her own plan — first, to escape, and second, revenge.

Definitely a page turner as I completed it in less than two days. The reader cannot help but notice the stark similarities between this fictional family and another, well-known über-religious family who have their own reality show, and who are also surrounded by scandal and cover-ups. There were a few moments when the direction of the book had me convinced I would be soon chucking it against the wall, but thankfully that didn't happen. Some aspects, such as the ending, seem slightly unrealistic, but overall it was a worthwhile read. ( )

Me, falling asleep: "I'm excited to get on the train tomorrow so I can keep reading my book."
Me: "That book is so good."
Also me: "What's that book about again?"

I loved this book so much!!! ( )

Reason Read: f2f bookclub selection January 2023
This has been done, nothing new here. It was easy to read, the story line pulls you along. It's a novel full of political correctness. ( )

you know it's not great when the ending is one of those "and this is what happened for the next several years" shpiels. it's just so funny bc it's so unrealistic. i hated all the characters. just like, not good. ( )

Essie's preacher father is the head of both his megachurch and his family, but it's Essie's mother who really runs the show. Literally. Essie's family stars in "Six for Hicks" a popular reality tv show focusing on their family and ministry. Essie's life has always come with cameras and production assistants. But her life isn't what millions of viewers might assume, and when a pregnancy test comes back positive, it's time for Essie to put in motion the plan she's been hatching for years to get herself out of the spotlight.

Essie is a great character. She's both determined and vulnerable, strong and nervous. She narrates her own story with a clear and convincing voice. Roarke, whose help she needs to get out, is also a great character, and his voice helps to make Essie's story fuller and more believable. On the other hand, Liberty Bell, the reporter to whom Essie entrusts her story, could have been the main character of her own book, but cramming her story into Essie's doesn't quite work, and she reads as more of a plot device than a fully-fleshed out character. Her presence is necessary, helping to illuminate parts of Essie's story that she couldn't give us on her own, but a simpler character, with less of a backstory might actually have served the novel as a whole better.

Still, with Essie's voice as the driving force of the narrative, this book is a success. I was rooting for Essie, and then for Essie and Roarke together, and was fully invested in their search to find the "right" path in a challenging situation.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review. ( )

Imagine just the reality show portion of The Hunger Games (the part with Cesar Flickerman and Katniss whining how she’s not pretty enough, then nailing it on camera). Expand that out and put it in today’s reality (in other words, something non-science fiction and non-post-apocalyptic). There’s a Peeta, there’s a Katniss, and there’s a Cesar who’s actually more like a Katniss who survived the games.

This is a grimdark look at families who exploit their kids for “reality TV” and evangelical religion. You are not going to feel happy while reading this, but you will be fascinated. Like when you see a car wreck or a fail video or… or, well, a reality show.

Essie belongs to a highly evangelical family that also produces a reality show. Imagine “19 Kids and Counting“, but it’s Joel Osteen. (I know *shudder*). If that wasn’t bad enough, Essie is now sixteen and pregnant (what, is she trying to audition for another reality show?) and it’s decided that she needs to have a quickie marriage so that A) the show can keep going and B) the family doesn’t lose its rep for wholesome Christian moral values.

The story rotates between three POVs. One is Essie’s, who has a plan to use this pregnancy to get out of the reality show game and bring her family down at the same time (but she won’t tell us how). Another is Roarke, the one picked to serve as her underage husband. The third is someone named Liberty Bell, the journalist Essie has chosen to give the exclusive story of her marriage to. Liberty Bell was once involved in a QAnon cult Bundy standoff-like situation that resulted in the death of her sister.

As you can tell, all these characters are built around an “issue”. But the story has trouble holding up the characters. You mostly read to find out information that the author is purposefully keeping from you to build tension (i.e. Essie knows who the father is obviously, but doesn’t tell us when it’s in her POV). Liberty’s story doesn’t have much to do with the main story–it’s more of a subplot that relates to the themes. It’s a C-story, and you know those only exist when the writers need to pad the running time. The themes therein are already stuff we know–about the hypocrisy of modern celebrity, the selfishness of fame. It’s basically about Karens, but at least they get theirs in the end. ( )

This book was so good! ( )

Seventeen year old Essie has grown up in public -- her father is an evangelical preacher, and her family has starred in a reality TV show since before she was born. But she wants out. She has a secret plan to make it happen.

This is utterly predictable YA that reads like second-rate Duggar fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, throwing in a mix of other hot button religious community stereotypes with their historical serial numbers also filed off (most prominently ex-gay camps, incest, regretted childhood memoirs, cults, and deadly standoffs with law enforcement). The characterization is weak, the plot is unrealistic, and the implicit lessons seem somewhat questionable.

But.... it's also incredibly gripping. I devoured this book faster than anything else I've read for months, and I kept going back to it in every spare moment I had. That's a pretty neat accomplishment for its author. The excellent pacing means I'll recommend it, though only to folks who are very forgiving of the usual weaknesses of YA as a genre. ( )

Easily one of my favorite books of 2018. I enjoyed the characters immensely and the story felt very fresh but relevant. I couldn’t put it down ( )

Seventeen-year-old Esther Anne Hicks and her family--led by her evangelical preacher father--have been part of a television show following their lives since before Esther was born. And she wants out. And she has a plan.

This was quite a page-turner for me--I wanted to know what would happen to Esther, what decisions she would ultimately make about exposing her family's secrets, and whether I was right about what that secret was. (I was. I'm not sure you're not *supposed* to know pretty much right away. But once you get just a handful of details about the Hicks family and about Esther, you'll have a suspicion, and you'll be right.) Ultimately this was an intriguing and in some ways compelling read (I especially enjoyed the portrayal of Roarke and his male friendships), but I wish there had been more about the specific ways that growing up on television affected Essie and her siblings. The fact that it is one of her older brothers who has been sexually abusing her for five years and is the father of her child seems a good "in" to an exploration of this, but he's just sort of pushed off as a "predator"--it's implied he's just a bad dude and likely a psychopath. And I certainly understand the choice to make this Esther's book and not focus on him, but it also feels a little like a glaring omission. There's this implication that this family is messed up and that the lack of privacy and constant fakery for cameras is part of that, but one of the biggest pieces of that puzzle is pretty much shrugged off. It's as if the story is only interested in the monstrousness of Essie's parents not protecting her and not interested at all in how the family got to a place where one of its children was praying on the others. And that seemed odd given that the set up to explore it was right there. But I don't mean to over emphasize this failing to bring that thematic element to the fore. I wish it had been there, but what *was* there was a fascinating read that gave me a lot to think about. And I loved the end. Worked out as it should, I thought. ( )

Where to begin? I had deeply mixed feelings about this book. The most basic parts of the storyline--a religious family with a media empire harbors a closet full of skeletons--held a great deal of appeal for me, but my expectations for it would have been better aligned had it been marketed as a young adult novel. There were a great number of overly dramatic, hard-to-believe plot points that made it seem silly as an adult novel.

Actually, I would have much preferred the story had it been written with older characters. Essie could have been a college student, hatching the same plot with a good friend, in order to escape the clutches of a controlling, abusive family with her fortune intact. The characters never seemed young enough to be believable 17-year-olds. They were written with the observation skills and thoughts of much, much older people. Essie's resolve and determination, her calm deliberation and plot to escape, while problematic in their own ways, did not seem like the panicked, desperate flight of a trapped young girl. Roarke interacted with much older characters with the wisdom of the aged and had the caring consideration of a man well-practiced in romantic relationships with women, rather than a closeted gay kid with no romantic experience at all. I was also bothered by the frequent violent desires Roarke expressed; he repeatedly had to restrain himself from physically attacking the villain. It was an odd characterization choice, given the story had strong themes meant to denounce male violence, and it seemed very out of character for Roarke as he was otherwise written.

The author tried very hard to make Essie's situation so complicated that her only way out was to orchestrate a secret plot that would ultimately destroy her entire family and their (admittedly, undeserved) livelihood. Unfortunately, I don't think it came out very believable. Unlike the real-life girls in the Duggar family, from whose story it seems the author took a great deal of inspiration, Essie goes to a public school, leaves the house alone, has her own room, and is allowed to use computers and phones without a chaperone. Her computer use is monitored and her family's fame in the small town where they live means that her movements are often watched, too, but Essie is not trapped in the way she could have been. She could have gone to the authorities, sought the help of any of her teachers, spoken to members of the camera crew that was so often with her, or, likely, escaped in any number of other ways. Yet, she instead plotted a way to get an uncontrolled cell phone from a reporter she'd never met before, then ran around leaving a breadcrumb trail of clues better suited to an Agatha Christie novel for the reporter to follow instead of, I don't know, maybe just texting her the information?! I had a hard time understanding the need for any of the intrigues in this story once she had the darn cell phone. It was a gaping loophole.

At the heart of the story, the 'love story' between Essie and Roarke, was another odd choice. Why was Roarke gay? It had no purpose in the plot. The story would have been improved if Essie and Roarke had known each other through high school and plotted together to overthrow her family, but as written Essie drags Roarke into her family drama through scheming and manipulation; he's well-paid for his performance in their televised romance, but he was basically blackmailed into marrying her by Essie herself, not her mother. Once committed to their bargain, the two of them go through all the tumult of a romance right out of the pages of a romance novel and, in the end, admit their love for one another just minutes before their arranged marriage is to take place, but Roarke is still gay. Why? He could have been gay and still gone through with the plot without all the romantic drama, or he could have been straight and they could have actually fallen in love; or, even better, Roarke could have been bisexual, keeping nearly every plot point intact along with creating a far more sensical narrative.

In the end, I read the entire story and then rewrote the whole of it in my head, imagining it as I would have liked it to have been. Omniscient viewpoint, older characters, fully-developed imperfect villain, more visible family dynamic, less cheesy romance, and the complete removal of Liberty Bell's character and storyline. But that's just me. I hope everyone else loves it as it is. ( )

was pretty much sold on the NetGalley blurb for this one: Teenage Esther Hicks is a daughter on a Christian family reality show… and also secretly pregnant.

Essie’s mother has turned her husband’s ministry and their family (including fertility struggles, premature babies, and now new daughters-in-law) into Six for Hicks, a popular reality show, a growing congregation and a substantial income. It’s hard not to see the Duggars in the growing brood of Christian reality TV stars and even in the language of courtship and publicly-performed service trips.

Essie has grown up with constant cameras on her, and readers can see how that’s affected her in a thousand ways. She doesn’t tell her mother that she’s expecting a baby, instead she fake-hides her pregnancy test someplace she knows her mother will find. Part of this story is just a fascinating look at lifestyle reality shows and an outwardly perfect family, and that alone would be a pretty great novel. But I was very quickly drawn in by the characters. Essie and her “fiance” Roarke are both realistic, complex teenagers in a wild and improbable situation, just trying to survive and still treat each other kindly.

While outwardly behaving as a faithful daughter and bride-to-be for the cameras and gossip-mongers, Essie decides to turn her secret journals into a tell-all, describing life as a Six for Hicks daughter and admitting the truth about her pregnancy. Journo/producer Liberty Bell, herself a former child of a survivalist cult and bestselling memoir author, may be able to tell Essie’s story to the world, but there are consequences to revealing the truth.

This was a rare novel in which I wasn’t sure how the story was going to end. (When one reveal was completely unsurprising to me, Liberty also sighed and asked why people have to be so predictable.) It was great because I wasn’t sure until the very end whether or not Essie would get married, or whether she’d release her book, and how things could go if she did one or both of these things. ( )

So many people loved this book that I feel bad giving it only 3 stars. I enjoyed it! I just think it had a lot of flaws. A lot of the character development didn’t feel real—we were told that it happened rather than shown, which is a cliche but is really very important. A lot of the plot points were very predictable, which isn’t necessarily an issue, but with things like Essie having been raped, the identity of her rapist, and Roarke being gay treated as big reveals, it would have been nice if they weren’t obvious all along. Or if they weren’t framed as dramatic reveals but just simple facts of the plot.

Regarding Roarke’s sexuality there were a few things I didn’t like. Essie somehow knowing and just flatly stating “you’re gay” to him really sucked. It happens a lot in books and it always sucks. Also, it’s never stated how his parents found out! I felt like that was missing. And then Adam is introduced and I knew immediately they would end up together. Of course, because they’re the only two gay characters in the book and they couldn’t possibly just become friends—that wouldn’t tie the loose ends up neatly enough.

I have to clarify again that I liked the book! I liked reading it! I just found it predictable and lacking in the depth that the subject matter deserved. Also, is this an adult book? It reads very YA, which is not a bad thing, but I think perhaps it should have been marketed more towards teens than adults. ( )

Like the Duggar girls, Essie Hicks grew up on a TV reality show as the youngest child of a prominent preacher. When she is 17 and unexpectedly pregnant, her imperious mother arranges a marriage for her with the son of a poor congregant family. The two don’t fall in love, exactly, but form an alliance that results in many secrets being brought to light.

The Book of Essie is an ambitious tale, with multiple narrators and plot points. If it is not entirely successful in realizing everything the author set out to do (she doesn't seem to have completed her homework on evangelical worship styles or LGBQT+ teens), it does work well enough to be worth reading. ( )

Great concept, but...
Six for Hicks is the perfect reality TV show starring the Hicks family. With father Hicks as the town preacher, the family seems to glow with godly light. All except Essie who is 17 and just found out she's pregnant.
The first few chapters were very intriguing but after that, things slowed to a crawl. There are sections and even chapters that could be completely taken out of the book and have it not hinder the story one bit. The writing itself was good but just WAY too much fluff.
The characters didn't seem real to me at all which may very well have been what the author was going for as they are a televised family. But for dealing with issues this serious, I felt that I needed a bit more emotion than what I was given. I mean when you put this many cliche teen-drama scenarios all into one book, you'd expect a lot more... drama. Instead it seemed to come up short and I found myself yelling at the characters more than anything. They just did not react realistically to their situations in my opinion.
This book has a great concept(s) but I just don't think it was executed quite right. I feel like there's too many unanswered questions and too many things that just didn't make sense because they were never fully explained. Again, the story (along with the characters) seemed very one-dimensional, which is wild considering how much fluff there is in this book. Weird right? Oh well, I digress.
Can't say I'd recommend this one. ( )

Compelling, multi-layered and important story! ( )

17-year-old Essie has lived her entire life so far in front of cameras; her family are the stars of a reality TV show that follows them both in the huge church her father preaches to and in their daily lives. She has felt trapped and her life has been dictated entirely by her mother, but recent events have given her hope that she may be able to find a way out...
Oooof, but this is a good one. Very seat-edgy, with twists that you can sort of see coming, but hold your breath for anyway, and with a strong, well-crafted, and important message woven into the suspense and thrills. I loved the complicated characters - and loved to hate some of them. Definitely recommended. ( )

The Book of Essie is a story of Essie, a 17 year old girl, whose family are famous due to her father's evangelical church. There are on TV and monitored nearly all the time. Everything she does falls under scrutiny. So, when it is discovered that she is pregnant, a solution to this 'problem' must be found.
Essie is smart and shrewd, and is calling the shots, although her parents are unaware that she is doing so. Essie enlists the help of a boy at school, Roarke, and another woman who was under a lot of scrutiny - Libby, or Liberty, Bell.
The three of them set out to take down Essie's family in a most satisfying way.
I really enjoyed this story, and I liked Essie's approach to things. I liked that she was practical but sincere in her plot. I liked how she was kind to Roarke. I also liked how she put her faith in Libby.
The three of them are misfits in a way, but are so likeable. Their faults add to their personality in good ways. I felt Essie's concern for others, the hurt she was enduring, and also her need to get away. I liked Roarke's vulnerability and his concern and compassion for Essie.
This is a story for our times. With all the TV evangelists and the constant media attention of reality TV stars - and keeping up appearances, The Book of Essie allows us to look at what is truly important, and worth fighting for in our lives. It is always about doing the right thing, protecting children, and being true to yourself. It is about being kind to others
#TheBookofEssie #MeghanMacLeanWeir ( )

I purchased this book from @bookofthemonth to read with my bestie @mycornerforbooksand. All opinions are my own. 🌟🌟🌟🌟 The Book of Essie by Meghan Maclean Weir. Essie is seventeen the star of a nationwide televised reality show based on her family and their standing in their church. Essie has a plan to make her way into the world without the cameras and in order to do that she must reveal family secrets that have long been locked behind closed doors and no where near cameras. Her mother will stop at nothing to bury the secrets Essie threatens to tell the world. The wedding of the century turns into the biggest show ever! Review also posted on Instagram @borenbooks, Library Thing, Goodreads/StacieBoren, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter @jason_stacie and my blog at readsbystacie.com ( )

Excellent Book - I enjoyed reading Essie's story very much. I liked the characters and although it was a predictable story I liked it a lot. ( )

The last four pages cost this novel 2 stars, because the author explicitly inserted her agenda. It felt Ike she didn’t trust me as a reader to figure it out. I agree with the points that she was trying to make, but the beauty of fiction is that, when it is done well, the story shares the message. ( )

Timely topic, but I'm conflicted by the rosy ending. ( )