Like many in my generation, I grew up watching the Duggars. As a conservative, Christian, homeschooled kid it was fun to see a family I could relate to on TV ... even if my family had two kids instead of nineteen. The relatability continues in Jinger's new book.

Can I just start this off by saying, go Jinger! As a longtime watcher of 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On, I've followed many of the older sisters for years and years. I always appreciated that the Duggars were Christians, but I knew there was something a little...off with the IBLP stuff their family followed. Jinger and her siblings were raised under the teachings of Bill Gothard, a conservative minister who founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Among those principles are strict guidelines regarding purity and modesty — but Jinger began to question the teachings as she grew up and started a family of her own. (While speaking to Us this month, Jinger referred to her childhood spiritual practice as “cult-like in many ways.”)I found myself drawn to the Dugger family when I was raising my own daughter with my husband. The show seemed to be filled with a Christian life and full of love. I instantly saw some of the wrongful things that Gothard was teaching and choked it up to just being a different denomination. As scandal after scandals began to hit the family, I realized that Gothard was more than different, he was dangerous. We stopped watching and supporting after 19 Kids and Counting was cancelled and never watched Counting On. The audiobook, which is how I consumed this book, is narrated by Jinger herself. It's always fun to hear a book in the author's own voice, but it's also worth noting that you lose the benefit of a professional narrator by going this route. For those who don't care for slower narration, be prepared to listen to this one at 1.5 or 2x. I don't like speeding up audiobooks, but I felt the slow words/minute with this one.

The way she shames any person that decided to leave the church completely isn't very Christian in my opinion. We all have different spiritual journeys and clearly the only option she thinks women should have is to just disentangle their beliefs just like her. Let me start with saying, I grew up in IBLP as well. I am a year younger than Jinger and interacted with her siblings at Big Sandy in Texas multiple times. My last family conference was spring 2014, where I taught pre-excel to some of the Bates kids. So yes, I often I say I grew up in the same community as the Duggars, because IBLP was a tight-knit world and we all knew of each other.Jinger Vuolo, the sixth child in the famous Duggar family of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On , recounts how she began to question the unhealthy ideology of her youth and learned to embrace true freedom in Christ. I wasn’t expecting (or desiring) this to be a theological treatise, but early on the author refers to this book as her theological journey. Something she (rightly) calls IBLP out on is proof texting, or only using a verse or two without context to prove a point. However, she continues to reference a verse or two here or there, falling into the same trap of proof texting. It takes a lot of courage to call out a man who was both your childhood hero and who dominated your religious life. This is a good start to publicly calling out an abusive leader who ruined many, many lives. Jinger Vuolo, the sixth child in the famous Duggar family of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On, recounts how she began to question the unhealthy ideology of her youth and learned to embrace true freedom in Christ. It is clear that Jinger has no real grasp of the deconstruction movement or the real reasons people left IBLP and Christianity.