Shame on You - by Clara Salaman

[AmandaS]

A vivid account of a british teenager trapped in a family who are commited to a religeous sect. The leaders of the sect have quite extreme rules and harsh punishments, and the girl - Caroline - has what is considered "free thinking views". She is seen as a threat to the spiritual learning of the other students and is constantly and severly punished for it, her parents turning a blind eye.

It jumps back and forth from past to present so you see not only the child's view of struggling to cope with her life and how she tries to escape but also how the adult copes later and dealing with and confronting the past.
I found it quite horrifying and confronting, and even more upsetting when i found out it was based on the author's own childhood.
But ... excellent book!

[Tim]

Iain Banks did an interesting book on this subject called Whit.

A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingenue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four- yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers that Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon. Truth and falsehood; kinship and betrayal; 'herbal' cigarettes and compact discs - Whit is an exploration of the techno-ridden barrenness of modern Britain from a unique perspective.