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Loose of Earth: A Memoir
An arresting memoir of love and unbending religion, toxicity and disease, and one family’s desperate wait for a miracle that never came. Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and science for literal interpretations of the bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, “it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.” What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” the presence of PFAs in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published April 16, 2024
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476 people want to read
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April 17, 2024
Loose of Earth tracks a brief and brutal season of domestic shatter: in 1990s Lubbock, Texas, the Blackburn children endure the agonizing death of their father from the first signs of intestinal cancer to its finish. Kathleen Dorothy, oldest of the five, now writes the story of her family’s ordeal with hard compassion and urgently beautiful prose.
For “K.D.” and her siblings, the kingdom of childhood is tenuous from the get-go; its dissolution is marked only by more of the same and harder. As the first daughter in a fierce evangelical Christian family, K.D. is defined as the on-call extension of her unyielding mother. I hesitate to brand any mother unusual, as if others are “usual.” But this matriarch is certainly disconcerting: a certified veterinarian who rejects science at home while practicing it at work. She holds an advanced university degree but will not entrust her children to outside institutions or teachers. A brilliant scholar who applies the same literality to scripture as to an anatomy textbook, Beverly Blackburn is accomplished and literate. But there’s no poetry in it. Her god grants no interpretive leeway. Neither does she.
Even before her husband’s illness raises the stakes, Beverly is pursuing a sort of advanced personal degree in Biblical absolutism. The children follow her tight home-school regimen. She delivers her fourth child alone in the bathroom after an altercation with her obstetrician. The family diet is proscribed. Even their ties to the local Christian community wane as K.D.’s parents turn inward. Five children, therefore, are held in thrall – imprisoned within the boundaries of “home,” held captive in the precincts of ideology.
Maybe this sounds dire – and it is – but the “universal” appeal of Blackburn’s narrative might well be in her intimate portrayal of childhood as captivity. Every child is, to a point, raised fundamentalist: this is really how things are. Here is truth; beyond be hazards and lies. Go only this far; return at this time, unchanged. Eat what we eat, when we eat. Parents are wardens, enclosing their children within narrow or expansive walls, containing them in warmth or malice, securing them inside the limits of adult capacities and intentions. As parents, we only release our inmates to the extent that we – or they – become able.
And so, although the mother may hold our attention, and the father our perplexed sympathy, Loose of Earth is finally about the emergence of a formidable daughter, gradually freed (as much as anyone can be freed from formative trauma) into the full power of language as she writes. Blackburn initially holds us within the confines of the literal story, present tense, yielding minimal authorial commentary as the beloved father degenerates, body and soul, under an increasingly bleak regime of faith-based “nutritional” healing. Neither parent will acknowledge any possibility but the pending “miracle” of sudden recovery. It’s a matter of insistent obedience, proof by sole reliance upon the Biblical God.
An adult man’s terminal illness, therefore, is an intimate family affair: the degeneration of his body, the odors, the slack yellowing skin, the protruding tumors are extensions of the family corpus. The family moves as a single entity in and out of revival tents, church meetings, special healing events. At their mother’s command, all five children sleep on the floor of the parental bedroom, on call to run errands or awaken to vigil. The whole family will be present, the scenario suggests, when the cancer is released. The man will stand up, lifted by the healing power of Christ, to resume his life as a pilot, an athlete, a father who runs the streets of Lubbock as his children ride their bikes alongside.
Young Kathleen inevitably begins to develop a second voice to interrogate the singularities of compliance and cohesion. Small acts of defiance – sneaking her mother’s razor to shave her own legs, listening to forbidden music in small moments of solitude in her room – hover symbolic in the twelve-year-old’s constricted world. Younger siblings defy her when Kathleen is assigned to stand in as her mother’s surrogate, fracturing an illusion of maternal wholeness. The jarring rites of religious healers veer off their promised results. Both parents, in desperate moments, take Kathleen into their confidence, splintering the univocal family message, pitting a foundational psychology against itself. Blackburn’s mature voice begins to intervene, and none too soon. Knowing that young K.D. will cross the chasm, lucid and humane enough to call back to herself, is a gift of pure grace to her readers.
Even so, it’s excruciating to advance. Subtle allusions to other authors’ forays into childhood disillusion marshal a spectral host to sustain us: Mary McCarthy’s tin butterfly flits along an episode about a lost birthday ring and its “miraculous” reappearance. The sheer associative discipline of retrieving a vanished time and place, item by piece by item, invokes Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” reminds us to attend while we can to the little band of five – who, despite the rigid expectations of piety, still inhabit childhood. They’re naïve and wise, and funny, and distinctively drawn. They can be bribed with extra graham crackers, another VHS movie from the parent-curated stash. They fight like wolf pups, growing toward their larger selves in fiercely individual ways.
Loose of Earth reminds us how childhood is the kingdom of uncanny frontiers – and I mean the word in the French sense – boundaries on a map, lines between categorical things. For the Blackburn children, the defining frontier encloses them inside a cramped but infinite us – Mom, Dad, Jesus, Texas. Cancer ruptures the fortress, enlarging contours, complicating oppositions and alliances. K.D. realizes how the very land beneath them has absorbed – and regurgitated – chemical poisons, perhaps the deep cause of her father’s wracked liver. She hearkens toward her father’s parents, who lost their son and grandchildren first to religious fanaticism, then to untreated illness and premature death. She loses a second parent, in the long run, even as she emulates her mother’s academic discipline and claims an inheritance of formidable intelligence.
More implicitly, but urgently, Blackburn leaves us with haunting questions about our national penchant for fundamentalism, our hunger for absolute and literal truth – religious, yes, but also secular, academic, political. Because she refuses caricature, Blackburn torches the thoroughly unuseful boundary between liberal and conservative: we are them. They are us. What pressures, in which crucial moments, harden our most supple capacities for good learning to stone? When does integrity slip into sadism? Why do we force our descendants to give us what our parents could not? How does sorrow beget cruelty; how compassion?
Loose of Earth is a testament. Blackburn’s family saga is, even (maybe especially) in its most garish scenes, a witness to who we are, in “real” America in our time. We’re made of stone and cancer, meat and smoking sky. Of poisoned water and bent integrity, of grief and love, of science and faith, artillery. Most heartbreaking, in this story and beyond it: we’re made of twisted love and gorgeous, awful, humanizing hope.
For “K.D.” and her siblings, the kingdom of childhood is tenuous from the get-go; its dissolution is marked only by more of the same and harder. As the first daughter in a fierce evangelical Christian family, K.D. is defined as the on-call extension of her unyielding mother. I hesitate to brand any mother unusual, as if others are “usual.” But this matriarch is certainly disconcerting: a certified veterinarian who rejects science at home while practicing it at work. She holds an advanced university degree but will not entrust her children to outside institutions or teachers. A brilliant scholar who applies the same literality to scripture as to an anatomy textbook, Beverly Blackburn is accomplished and literate. But there’s no poetry in it. Her god grants no interpretive leeway. Neither does she.
Even before her husband’s illness raises the stakes, Beverly is pursuing a sort of advanced personal degree in Biblical absolutism. The children follow her tight home-school regimen. She delivers her fourth child alone in the bathroom after an altercation with her obstetrician. The family diet is proscribed. Even their ties to the local Christian community wane as K.D.’s parents turn inward. Five children, therefore, are held in thrall – imprisoned within the boundaries of “home,” held captive in the precincts of ideology.
Maybe this sounds dire – and it is – but the “universal” appeal of Blackburn’s narrative might well be in her intimate portrayal of childhood as captivity. Every child is, to a point, raised fundamentalist: this is really how things are. Here is truth; beyond be hazards and lies. Go only this far; return at this time, unchanged. Eat what we eat, when we eat. Parents are wardens, enclosing their children within narrow or expansive walls, containing them in warmth or malice, securing them inside the limits of adult capacities and intentions. As parents, we only release our inmates to the extent that we – or they – become able.
And so, although the mother may hold our attention, and the father our perplexed sympathy, Loose of Earth is finally about the emergence of a formidable daughter, gradually freed (as much as anyone can be freed from formative trauma) into the full power of language as she writes. Blackburn initially holds us within the confines of the literal story, present tense, yielding minimal authorial commentary as the beloved father degenerates, body and soul, under an increasingly bleak regime of faith-based “nutritional” healing. Neither parent will acknowledge any possibility but the pending “miracle” of sudden recovery. It’s a matter of insistent obedience, proof by sole reliance upon the Biblical God.
An adult man’s terminal illness, therefore, is an intimate family affair: the degeneration of his body, the odors, the slack yellowing skin, the protruding tumors are extensions of the family corpus. The family moves as a single entity in and out of revival tents, church meetings, special healing events. At their mother’s command, all five children sleep on the floor of the parental bedroom, on call to run errands or awaken to vigil. The whole family will be present, the scenario suggests, when the cancer is released. The man will stand up, lifted by the healing power of Christ, to resume his life as a pilot, an athlete, a father who runs the streets of Lubbock as his children ride their bikes alongside.
Young Kathleen inevitably begins to develop a second voice to interrogate the singularities of compliance and cohesion. Small acts of defiance – sneaking her mother’s razor to shave her own legs, listening to forbidden music in small moments of solitude in her room – hover symbolic in the twelve-year-old’s constricted world. Younger siblings defy her when Kathleen is assigned to stand in as her mother’s surrogate, fracturing an illusion of maternal wholeness. The jarring rites of religious healers veer off their promised results. Both parents, in desperate moments, take Kathleen into their confidence, splintering the univocal family message, pitting a foundational psychology against itself. Blackburn’s mature voice begins to intervene, and none too soon. Knowing that young K.D. will cross the chasm, lucid and humane enough to call back to herself, is a gift of pure grace to her readers.
Even so, it’s excruciating to advance. Subtle allusions to other authors’ forays into childhood disillusion marshal a spectral host to sustain us: Mary McCarthy’s tin butterfly flits along an episode about a lost birthday ring and its “miraculous” reappearance. The sheer associative discipline of retrieving a vanished time and place, item by piece by item, invokes Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” reminds us to attend while we can to the little band of five – who, despite the rigid expectations of piety, still inhabit childhood. They’re naïve and wise, and funny, and distinctively drawn. They can be bribed with extra graham crackers, another VHS movie from the parent-curated stash. They fight like wolf pups, growing toward their larger selves in fiercely individual ways.
Loose of Earth reminds us how childhood is the kingdom of uncanny frontiers – and I mean the word in the French sense – boundaries on a map, lines between categorical things. For the Blackburn children, the defining frontier encloses them inside a cramped but infinite us – Mom, Dad, Jesus, Texas. Cancer ruptures the fortress, enlarging contours, complicating oppositions and alliances. K.D. realizes how the very land beneath them has absorbed – and regurgitated – chemical poisons, perhaps the deep cause of her father’s wracked liver. She hearkens toward her father’s parents, who lost their son and grandchildren first to religious fanaticism, then to untreated illness and premature death. She loses a second parent, in the long run, even as she emulates her mother’s academic discipline and claims an inheritance of formidable intelligence.
More implicitly, but urgently, Blackburn leaves us with haunting questions about our national penchant for fundamentalism, our hunger for absolute and literal truth – religious, yes, but also secular, academic, political. Because she refuses caricature, Blackburn torches the thoroughly unuseful boundary between liberal and conservative: we are them. They are us. What pressures, in which crucial moments, harden our most supple capacities for good learning to stone? When does integrity slip into sadism? Why do we force our descendants to give us what our parents could not? How does sorrow beget cruelty; how compassion?
Loose of Earth is a testament. Blackburn’s family saga is, even (maybe especially) in its most garish scenes, a witness to who we are, in “real” America in our time. We’re made of stone and cancer, meat and smoking sky. Of poisoned water and bent integrity, of grief and love, of science and faith, artillery. Most heartbreaking, in this story and beyond it: we’re made of twisted love and gorgeous, awful, humanizing hope.
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October 16, 2024Not bad, but not amazing. I try not to rate memoirs as it's so subjective. I thought the discussions around PFAS and toxic waste chemicals was interesting but underdeveloped. It didn't naturally read alongside the rest of the book as was (I assumed) intended, and didn't feel fully realized as an aside element.
I picked this up because it's set in Lubbock, TX & I never get to read books about Lubbock. So much of this family, this grief, this skewed world was recognizable to me. Glad I read it, but not sure how much it will stick.
I picked this up because it's set in Lubbock, TX & I never get to read books about Lubbock. So much of this family, this grief, this skewed world was recognizable to me. Glad I read it, but not sure how much it will stick.
March 31, 2025
Loose of Earth is a recollection of the author’s childhood in West Texas. Homeschooled by a fanatical evangelical Christian mother who eschewed modern medicine in exchange for faith healers and clean eating in the face of her husband‘s terminal cancer, K.D. must grow up quickly while caring for her ailing father and younger siblings.
“How was it that two grown, college-educated adults of good intention and sufficient means came to plead holy in the face of facts?” “Literally? We thought God would literally heal dad?”
The author suspects the cancer was caused by her father‘s exposure to PFAS chemicals in the drinking water during his time in the service.
“How was it that two grown, college-educated adults of good intention and sufficient means came to plead holy in the face of facts?” “Literally? We thought God would literally heal dad?”
The author suspects the cancer was caused by her father‘s exposure to PFAS chemicals in the drinking water during his time in the service.
April 17, 2024
4.5
Thanks to univerity of texas press for the gifted book.
My weekend consisted of being mad, being sad, and unlocking memories from my family’s own bouts with cancer.This is a beautifully written and affecting memoir that deals with faith, science, grief, girlhood, and memory. How do you reconcile a past that never made sense and a miracle that never arrived?
In Loose of Earth, Blackburn looks back at the 13 months her father suffered through cancer when she was 12 and then 13. While both parents were college educated, she a veterinarian and he a pilot, they began to embrace the evangelical church in the 80’s. A mistrust of government, and later medicine, formed, leading to homeschooling and home births by the time the fourth baby arrived. This was pushed to extremes when the cancer diagnosis came. How does a marathon running, healthy, 38 year old have such an aggressive form of colon cancer? Surely it must be a test from God. Demons were allowed in and now they must be fought through prayer, diet, and faith. The thing is, K.D. got to see her mom work at the veterinary hospital often as part of her homeschooling. How was the woman hiding pain killers from her husband the same woman providing medical aid and comfort to her patients?
Blackburn is so perceptive, even as a child, where small details don’t pass her by. It’s interesting that the book is written in the present tense almost 25 years later, so we get both the child perspective and the adult writing now examining these subtle details. How was a child supposed to carry this heavy burden? Did she ever really believe it?
While it’s going to be compared to Educated and How to Say Babylon, I think Blackburn’s research into PFAS, or forever chemicals, and the changing landscape of West Texas brings it into conversation with Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland. The military bases her father grew up in and worked at have been found to be contaminated with these ‘forever chemicals’ due to the use of fire fighting foams. This was known by the DOD since the 70’s, but it wasn’t made public until the 2000’s. Was this the cause of her father's cancer? This aspect didn't always mesh perfectly with the rest of the story, but I'll forgive it for its importance and the sentence level beauty found here.
Thanks to univerity of texas press for the gifted book.
My weekend consisted of being mad, being sad, and unlocking memories from my family’s own bouts with cancer.This is a beautifully written and affecting memoir that deals with faith, science, grief, girlhood, and memory. How do you reconcile a past that never made sense and a miracle that never arrived?
In Loose of Earth, Blackburn looks back at the 13 months her father suffered through cancer when she was 12 and then 13. While both parents were college educated, she a veterinarian and he a pilot, they began to embrace the evangelical church in the 80’s. A mistrust of government, and later medicine, formed, leading to homeschooling and home births by the time the fourth baby arrived. This was pushed to extremes when the cancer diagnosis came. How does a marathon running, healthy, 38 year old have such an aggressive form of colon cancer? Surely it must be a test from God. Demons were allowed in and now they must be fought through prayer, diet, and faith. The thing is, K.D. got to see her mom work at the veterinary hospital often as part of her homeschooling. How was the woman hiding pain killers from her husband the same woman providing medical aid and comfort to her patients?
Blackburn is so perceptive, even as a child, where small details don’t pass her by. It’s interesting that the book is written in the present tense almost 25 years later, so we get both the child perspective and the adult writing now examining these subtle details. How was a child supposed to carry this heavy burden? Did she ever really believe it?
While it’s going to be compared to Educated and How to Say Babylon, I think Blackburn’s research into PFAS, or forever chemicals, and the changing landscape of West Texas brings it into conversation with Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland. The military bases her father grew up in and worked at have been found to be contaminated with these ‘forever chemicals’ due to the use of fire fighting foams. This was known by the DOD since the 70’s, but it wasn’t made public until the 2000’s. Was this the cause of her father's cancer? This aspect didn't always mesh perfectly with the rest of the story, but I'll forgive it for its importance and the sentence level beauty found here.
July 6, 2024
People living in the United States are exposed to many environmental agents that may or may not be the cause of cancer. Those in the military have additional exposure due to the materials used to "kill the enemy" and probably a few who handle them in transport. KD is a teenager who observes her dad fight the cancer battle and is influenced by her mom's evangelical beliefs of homeschooling, strict dietary practices, and faith healing.
KD's father, a former Air Force pilot was diagnosed with cancer at age thirty-eight and fell into the faith practice of seeking God's healing as he continued to weaken. The author being a youngster questioned her belief as she took on the extra responsibility of caring for her siblings.
Lubbock, Texas is a city full of churches, providing a "selection" of beliefs to fit your taste without having a Biblical basis, but Grace had a service called "Miracles On 34th Street" that provided a source of faith healers where the family became faithful members. Miracles did not come to the former Air Force officer and KD speaks of how her faith was challenged as death entered the family.
KD's father, a former Air Force pilot was diagnosed with cancer at age thirty-eight and fell into the faith practice of seeking God's healing as he continued to weaken. The author being a youngster questioned her belief as she took on the extra responsibility of caring for her siblings.
Lubbock, Texas is a city full of churches, providing a "selection" of beliefs to fit your taste without having a Biblical basis, but Grace had a service called "Miracles On 34th Street" that provided a source of faith healers where the family became faithful members. Miracles did not come to the former Air Force officer and KD speaks of how her faith was challenged as death entered the family.
February 23, 2024
Loved, loved, loved this memoir about family of origin and how it colors our adult lives. KD Blackburn writes eloquently about growing up in Lubbock, TX, the eldest daughter of a pilot father and a veterinarian mother who fervently believe (or want to) in the power of God's ability to heal the sickest among them. Her father. Diagnosed with colon cancer, he turns from traditional methods of healing (at his wife's urging?) and refuses any medical treatment. As Evangelicals, they are believing for a miracle despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, and readers will be left to ponder the difference between faith and delusion.
The book chapters are interspersed with descriptions of the stark landscape surrounding them, which serves to remind readers of how small and insignificant humans truly are.
For readers who loved "Educated" by Tara Westover
* I read an advance copy and was not compensated
The book chapters are interspersed with descriptions of the stark landscape surrounding them, which serves to remind readers of how small and insignificant humans truly are.
For readers who loved "Educated" by Tara Westover
* I read an advance copy and was not compensated
September 1, 2025
An exquisitely written memoir, some sentences will stop you midway in order to appreciate their beauty and the pain underlying them. A story of an evangelical family in Texas struggling with trying to live apart from the secular world. Their lives are turned upside down by the father’s cancer diagnosis. The parents , both well educated, nevertheless, turn to miracle cures including faith healers, extreme diets and seek no conventional medical treatment. It is a difficult book to read but the tenderness in which it’s written by their daughter kept me reading. If you aren’t familiar with the evangelical culture that grounds the story you will likely be surprised at the extremes the family goes to in order to live out their faith. It is maddening, complex and gentle in turns. the author does an amazing job explaining how as a child and now as an adult she came to grips with the mistakes her family made while understanding the family love that undergirded them. Blackburn also includes the history of so called “forever chemicals” prevalent in the water in
many military bases that her father who was both a military brat and who served in the military, was exposed to and which likely was the cause of his cancer.
many military bases that her father who was both a military brat and who served in the military, was exposed to and which likely was the cause of his cancer.
June 24, 2024
A stunning testament to grief, faith, and love written by a brilliant professor and mentor of mine. An environmental narrative, faith reckoning, coming of age story, and master class in metaphor all in one. Absolutely loved and highly recommend !
June 3, 2024
This is a memoir and a bold exposé of love, unbending religious fanaticism, disease, chemicals, and a family’s desperate wait for a miracle that never came. The author shares her experience growing up as a 12-year-old and the oldest of five kids in West Texas. She was homeschooled due to her family's skepticism of public education and other institutions, including the medical industry. The book delves into her father's late-stage colon cancer diagnosis and his eventual death as a result of her family’s reliance on faith-based healing over conventional medicine and the responsibilities she shouldered as a young caretaker.
This story could have been told in 8 million different ways, but it was eloquently presented through beautiful language and English. The author skillfully includes specific details and moments, using words like art. I have not cried at a book in a long time, but it was genuinely touching and heart-wrenching at the same time.
To listen to my interview with the author, visit my podcast at:
https://zibbymedia.com/blogs/transcri...
This story could have been told in 8 million different ways, but it was eloquently presented through beautiful language and English. The author skillfully includes specific details and moments, using words like art. I have not cried at a book in a long time, but it was genuinely touching and heart-wrenching at the same time.
To listen to my interview with the author, visit my podcast at:
https://zibbymedia.com/blogs/transcri...
July 16, 2024
As someone from a rural, religious family, who was also homeschooled, I resonated with so much of Blackburn's memoir. She has a surprisingly crisp recall of details from her childhood - I admit that, in several scenes, I wondered how much was remembered and how much was constructed for narrative effect - and her weave of personal story with researched argument (maybe 80/20?) often felt seamless and compelling. Blackburn's writing voice is lyrical and persuasive, which fits the religious tones of her memoir, but there were several phrasings that felt unnecessarily formal/stilted and so took me out of the scene. All that said, I particularly appreciated how she focused the memoir intensely on the thirteen-or-so months of her father's illness, even as she spoke about the process of remembering (and writing) in the book and in her epilogue, showing how such childhood trauma is complicated, messy, and never fully resolved for every individual involved.
October 22, 2025
This was a tough one to read. I still want the mom, a real human in the world today, to have gotten some kind of comeuppance. Her wild overconfidence about the power of her faith and her superiority to everyone was just so difficult to spend time with. It was interesting to read this so closely in time to The Poisonwood Bible because there were a lot of parallels between her and the father in that. Both were completely willing to put their spouse and children through hell because of their beliefs. So sickening. But the father in Poisonwood was at least fictional.
It's ultimately just so sad. The poor father, living through 13 months of excruciating pain because of a total lack of reason. And the fact that she was a scientist, a veterinarian, boggles the mind. That poor man. Those poor kids.
It was a relief to finish this book.
It's ultimately just so sad. The poor father, living through 13 months of excruciating pain because of a total lack of reason. And the fact that she was a scientist, a veterinarian, boggles the mind. That poor man. Those poor kids.
It was a relief to finish this book.
June 3, 2024
“Loose of Earth” is a beautiful and challenging expression of slow and traumatic loss– a story familiar to many. It teases out relatable themes of alienation and fledgling adolescence, while telling a wholly unique story that weaves layers of complexity into the familiar. It reminded me what it’s like to hate your hometown, love your family, resent all the newfound responsibility, and slowly lose your childhood along with your most cherished hero to a disease that takes and takes and takes.
The author vividly describes West Texas to great effect throughout the story.
I truly enjoyed “Loose of Earth.” It broke my heart.
The author vividly describes West Texas to great effect throughout the story.
I truly enjoyed “Loose of Earth.” It broke my heart.
July 15, 2024
This memoir tells the story of Blackburn’s religious family in Lubbock and the challenges they face when her father is diagnosed with cancer. The book weaves together themes of religion, family and environmental justice.
October 25, 2024
Interesting read a true story of a US pilot living in west Texas who develops colon cancer & his family’s religious beliefs used as a means to cure him. It’s also a warning lesson on the possible effects of the 3M created foam used to fight fires & it’s link to on cancer cases in that area.
January 4, 2025
My Father-in-law, Bill Kennedy is the authors father’s cousin and Suzy Malaska’s brother. He gave me this book to read over the holidays and I blazed through it. You know that scene of Harry Potter where Snape gives Harry his memories in his tears? That’s what this book felt like.
March 13, 2025
Beautiful words and a gripping story in some ways. The research portion is mixed in a way that messed with the flow of the book for me. Even though the epilogue helped, I am still left feeling unresolved.
April 27, 2024
A beautifully written memoir that I couldn’t put down.
April 30, 2024
A heartbreaking memoir of religion and faith gone wrong. Beautifully written.
June 5, 2024
Heartbreaking
September 2, 2024
Painfully beautiful.
This book is brilliant and plaintive. It artistically uses words to paint an extraordinary portrait of wide emotion and hard truth. Thank you for this!
This book is brilliant and plaintive. It artistically uses words to paint an extraordinary portrait of wide emotion and hard truth. Thank you for this!
September 2, 2024
This is definitely one of my absolute favorite memoirs, and certainly my favorite read so far this year. Heartbreaking yet beautiful.
October 4, 2024
Really interesting story. Lots of heartbreaking but informative history
November 21, 2024
Beautifully written, the story of he father's last 13 months, a harrowing indictment against evagelicalism.
December 8, 2024
This felt more like someone trying to process their memories and feelings in real time.
May 19, 2025
Kathleen's story was so close to home. Universal City is just a couple miles away from our neighborhood. Her story of her father's fatal cancer and the unrelenting pursuit of Word of Faith healing her mother insisted for his treatment was difficult to read. Kathleen does an excellent job conveying her turmoil and conviction this form treatment left on her and her family. What I do wish was more of her thoughts and shared her process of detangling this type of faith. Overall it was a story that will stay near me for a long time.
August 4, 2025
the way this grapples with land and faith and the choices our parents make is going to stick with me for awhile. I’d love to read more dissecting this from the author
August 31, 2025
Amazing book, beautifully written.
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October 3, 2024Audiobook: This book was the story of a girl who was raised as a strong evangelical Christian. Her father got cancer, and the story was really his dying story. They refused to give him any treatment or medicine for pain because that would be a lack of faith. Ultimately, of course she grows up and leaves the church. Written almost like poetry it was interesting to listen to.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews