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Escape By Carolyn JessopLaura Palmer ( Broadway )
Release Date: 2007-10-16
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Product Description
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.
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 Fascinating!
This book is so interesting because it is one woman's experience in the FLDS church, which is deeply rooted in polygamy. The women shown in this story are abused so much that it is almost unbelievable that it really could be happening in our country. Escape is very eye-opening and will grab anyone's attention! Worth reading!! As a side note, the FLDS or Fundamental Latter Day Saints is not the same thing as the LDS or "Mormon" church. The LDS or Mormons do not believe in polygamy.
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A must read!
This book is fascinating and sad all at the same time. It not only touches the victims of FLDS but anyone who has been in a abusive situation. Carolyn is an extraordinary woman! I applaud her courage and strength. I couldn't put this book down. It is a unique and current look into the FLDS. Carolyn and Laura Palmer are very descriptive and make it feel as if you are actually witnessing the events; which can be somewhat painful to read. I think it is an important book that should be read by all.
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 No words can describe... ( tammydietz )
See what happens when you give a girl an education? I trust the FLDS organization learned its lesson with Carolyn Jessop and has forbidden college education for females. God only knows what would happen if more women became educated. They would begin to think, for heavens sake! Escape is equal parts abomination and fascination. The thought that there is even a shred of truth to this book and that the FLDS still thrives is criminal. Some might say that only in our great country could and should such religious freedoms be allowed. I say that is taking the notion of freedom to the extreme. Though stylistically mediocre, Escape is an important book for women everywhere who chain themselves, by their own free will, to patriarchal prisons. Such limitations may seem safe at the start, even dreamily without accountability. But in the end, the slave will either go mad or free. Women are human afterall.
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Escape ( jeanieb42 )
This has to be one of the best non fiction stories i have ever read, cannot beleive in this century that this horrible abuse of women and children is allowed to exist.
Those poor girls have never had a chance to know what a normal life should be like. Brave Carolyn for doing what she did.
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A Book About Far More than Polygamy ( wesleyrsmith )
"Escape" has had a more profound impact on me than perhaps any book in recent memory. This is not just a book about a fundamentalist religion and its abuse of women. Her experiences in the FLDS provide a roadmap for how dogma of any kind can so quickly be used by the powerful against the powerless. Her description of a self-referential faith as a control mechanism has analogs in both the religious and secular worlds.
My only criticism of the book might be that she did not succeed in explaining how mind control within the FLDS community was so much more powerful than physical control. Why did she stay for so long in the face of such abuse? Why didn't she reach out to those in the medical profession that could have helped her? I know why, but as I was reading her book I kept thinking how those who were raised in modern America would not.
For those readers that do not come out of a fundamentalist upbringing, it may be impossible to ever fully understand Carolyn's actions. This does not, however, invalidate her story. It rings true to me, and hopefully will to all those who read it.
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