The Last Days is an interesting insight into growing up within the Jehovah Witness faith. Having met an ex-JW, their story is very different to the authors and I'm glad that my friend is still on great terms with his parents and came out of it relatively unscathed.

The authors experience is very different and for me, it was good to read it from another point of view. Her struggles with making sense of the world and the restrictions and expectations that were placed on her, lead her down a very difficult, life-limiting path which was very sad to read.

I was glad that she managed to get out and write about her experiences, that's a very brave thing to do and no doubt has cost her massively.

If anyone can understand where the author is coming from, it's me - I also grew up as a JW, finally leaving in my late teens. A lot of the things detailed are absolutely true; JWs do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas, you are encouraged to keep away from 'worldly people', women are definitely considered second class but it's wrapped up in the language of being a "complement" to man, & having a career/going to university is a no-no.. From my early teens I chafed against the expectations & I had questions about the teachings I was not allowed to ask, & upon leaving I felt exactly like Nicole Kidman looks in that photograph of her shortly after divorcing Tom Cruise - freedom.

Where our experiences diverge though is the author's experience of other Witnesses. There are most definitely those that live a dual life, with their 'meeting face' & what they are like away from the public ministry, & there were cliques, but I also met some genuinely lovely people. We certainly never covered the windows of the Kingdom Hall so we weren't distracted by the outside - that's extremely odd behaviour & I think it says more about that particular congregation than the JWs as a whole.

Overall, whilst everyone's experiences are different & are uniquely their own, I expected to feel some affinity with what the author has gone through as a young person, but there was very little. I empathise with the author's battles against a patriarchal religion, & an eating disorder, & am glad to see that they have managed to achieve some happiness for themselves, but I struggled with their writing style which was overly florid at times. 2.5 stars (rounded up on sites where half star ratings not allowed).

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Ebury Publishing/Penguin Random House, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

It does not surprise me that this author used writing as a means of coping with life and a way of working out where she fits in as she is a beautiful writer with excellent recall of her early life. She rightly says that this is a memoir and admits that memories can be false and are also different for different people. Jehovah’s witnesses often knocked on my door in the 1990s and I used to feel sorry for the little children who must have had to get used to doors being shut in their faces. I haven’t seen any recently but a friend of mine has a sister who became a Jehovah’s witness and I have to say she allowed her children to celebrate Christmas while not celebrating herself. Ali writes about living in a cult. She had to be very strong to escape such indoctrination and to lose her family. Readers with eating disorders will be able to relate to Ali’s anorexia and realise that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The book also talks about coercive control which is suffered by many people as well as those living in a patriarchal society such as the Jehovah’s witnesses. The role of religion is also explored and provides much food for thought. Highly recommended.

This is not an easy read, nor an enjoyable one, for this reader at least. Much of what I read in this book does not chime with people I know who are members of this branch of religion, some of whom are family in-laws.
I am concerned that this may be a very one-sided view of Jehovahs Witnesses, as seen through the prism of the difficult and rebellious teenage years of the author. She is clearly traumatised by her earlier upbringing., and events in her younger life, not all necessarily attributable to JW religion.
I find myself questioning many of the customs and behaviours portrayed here. I would like to read a more balanced view of life in the JW religion, in the interests of fairness and open- mindedness.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my advance copy of this book.

I received this ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Wow wow wow!

It’s very rare that I read autobiographies or memoirs but when I read about this one I was intrigued as I’ve always found religion fascinating and suffocating if I’m honest.

The writing style is incredible it’s like you’re right in the room/situation with Ali in every part of her life year and year.

This is a very raw and deeply honest look into the life of a Jehovah’s Witness from the perspective of a young girl right up to being a woman with a child/children, this harrowing memoir will stay with me for a long time.

That was my one and only (knowing) run in with the JW. I went on to read Ian McEwan’s rendering on the faith, focused on the refusal of blood transfusions, and then listened to Deborah Frances White’s anecdotes on her well-loved podcast The Guilty Feminist , where she explains the sinister side of her own Australian Witness upbringing. That is my working knowledge, until I sat down with Ali Millar, author of the memoir The Last Days, a story of being raised in the Scottish Borders as a member of the Jehovah Witnesses.

We meet in the wake of the Roe vs Wade injustice, and although that seems tangential to the story of Millar’s life, one of the most visceral scenes in the book (and there are many), is set in a Scottish hospital ward, her own abortion looming. She can still recall the bland, militant room, lacking any identifying features to let a passer-by know a person is making a choice to terminate a pregnancy, while we talk,. She warns of religious folk in Scotland and beyond that will be emboldened by the American decision, knowing all too well how religious doctrine can impinge on personal choice through her own dalliances with faith. “From a young kid, knowing if I got pregnant, I had to have the baby, regardless, we never called them embryos, foetuses, they were always, babies, children”.

“They [America] are moving towards a theocracy, and that was what I was raised in”. Millar grew up believing the world was going to end, imminently. The story of her life opens with her mother, we are with her, in first person present tense, feeling out the rules of this religion her mother has seemingly, quite randomly, adopted as a new way to live by. “I chose the tense partly as it is one of the best ways to build tension, I wanted the reader to be right next to me”. It is disconcerting as a reader, sold on the blurb of a cult like religion ruining a woman’s life, to be immediately stuck in the head of naivety, of childhood. She chose this style for good reason though, “a child can present events without historical bias, I never wanted to tell the reader what to think, to pass judgement on the organisation”, although as the chapters go on, it is difficult to unsee the misogyny, the discrimination, the destruction of family it caused.

It would be an easy sell, to market this story as cultish, the appetite for cult tales never seems to die (and I am as guilty as the rest, devouring the newest Netflix output alongside you all). The word cult isn’t mentioned until the final pages, when the afterword gestures towards the rotten core of the group, hinting at money laundering and illicit power, though that is a story for another day I suspect. Millar remains adamant that the first person tense didn’t allow for reflection on cult-like behaviours, “the reader is doing the reflection, I spent my whole life banging people over the head with my beliefs, I have no desire to be doing that now”. And rightly so, what makes a cult a cult is, in part, its willing participants, no one who knows their group is a cult is joining in, as Millar notes, “I just believed I was part of the one true religion”.

We stay with Millar as she ages from young girl to teenager and rebellion sets in. She learns to live outside of the rules, for the most part. As trouble from above came to meet her, as it does for anyone, particularly a woman, disobeying the dogma, Millar turned to other compulsions to keep her internal torture at bay. She became consumed by an eating disorder, which wasn’t looked upon fondly by elders, it is after all, ungrateful to refuse the food Jehovah gives you. She says there is little acknowledgement of mental ill health or conditions like Anorexia, “there are a lot of people within the organisations mainly women, where the default is to be depressed.. You are told to expect depression as part of the deal when living in Satan's system [aka the secular world].” It’s a specific kind of religious dogma that weaponizes mental ill health as the anti-Christ, when the groups own practices are a more likely cause of distress.

Millar notes a difference between physically leaving and mentally unpicking the past. Most readers will highlight the most visceral scene of Millar’s witness life as the sofa side grilling on questions of sexual pleasure, infidelity and unfaithfulness by three elders. I was moved too, but am more attached to another image, long after Millar sets the Bible aside. She carries her child to the entrance of her flat, leaves the carrier at the door and rushes to be sick in the bathroom, stuck by the fear that Satan was coming for her child. Millar recalls this vividly: “That was 2014, years after I left. I was still having nightmares, and flashbacks, I didn’t know it was PTSD then”. Even after a decade without the church, she believes she will always be in recovery from religion.

It is a story of trauma, religious and intergenerational. Her entry into what can be described as a cult of its own – motherhood, forces Millar to make her final exit from the group: “I could have carried on lying to myself with that doubling, but as soon as you are responsible for someone else it changes, I couldn't inflict that upon her”. The story starts with her mother’s choice to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses and we close with her exit as a new mother, the breaking of intergenerational trauma guiding Millar’s story to a redemptive end.

Will JW members be heading to Waterstones? Unlikely. “They are warned against the media, which I am included in, part of Satan’s system, I doubt devout people will read it” - they will be told not to. “I expect there will be backlash, they’ve [The Jehovah's Witness] have already published articles in their own magazines about not believing books, and seeking out critical things”. Millar still hopes the book will reach people who are teetering on the edge, someone questioning, like she once was: “People who have doubts, who think that it's something wrong with them instead of the system they are in, I hope they will find some kind of comfort from the book”.

If we take women’s writing on trauma as catharsis, as much of modern literary criticism does, the question would be rhetorical. However, Millar [and I] strongly rebuke such belittling of women’s words. She describes the writing process as hell, “I felt sick, I had panic attacks, I have never showered as much as I did when I wrote that first draft” - that doesn’t sound like self-care to me.

A memoir of growing female in a conservative high demand religion. Candid but lyrical, harsh like the Scottish weather and beautiful as the country's landscape.

(Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC!) ...more

I remember being a young girl at middle school and there being a family of girls who could never join in assembly when we sang hymns and could never join in making cards at Easter or Christmas. We knew they were Jehovah Witnesses but we didn’t have a clue what that meant. Later I learnt they couldn’t have blood if they were in hospital and needed it. But how could we understand, we were 10 years old.
When I saw this title, those little girls came back to me and I wanted to know more about what their childhood must have been like. Ali Millar bravely tells it as it is: all the teachings; the rules; the belief that the outside world was full of sin; the coming of the end and the new world for the Witnesses that would follow. Her writing pulls you in from the very beginning, simple and yet captivating. I wonder now if those little girls at my school felt like Ali. A highly emotive subject that will leave you speechless at times, I felt so much for Ali growing up and becoming a young woman. A very courageous person in many ways. Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for a review.

This was a really interesting book. We follow Ali through her childhood into adulthood being indoctrinated with the teachings of Jehovahs Witness program. It is hard to review as everyone is entitled to their own religious thoughts and anything negative could be construed as religious bigotry. However Ali obviously suffered horrendously to the point of the only thing she could control was her eating and almost killing herself. She struggled against the Kingdom from an early age being frightened of the stories of the last days and the new system. I was rooting for Ali to find the strength to leave and become her own person which is incredibly hard as she risks being shunned and losing all contact with the only family she has ever known. The story is gripping, harrowing and heartbreaking from the first chapter.

This was such a fantastic and candidly open memoir, where the author did not hold back in showing how truly toxic the Jehovah's Witness community can be.

Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and leaving the community when I was 14, I have struggled to find memoirs, if any, that portray the inside of the community as it really is. Most people view Witnesses as quiet but strange with their stances on refusing blood transfusions and not celebrating birthdays and Christmas, but not many people understand the abuse and trauma you can go through when you are a member as well as when you leave.

Ali Millar is a beautiful writer and is able to write from each period of her life as if she was still in that moment. I really do thank her for bringing the truth to light and making it accessible for everyone. Whether you are into non-fiction works about religion and cults, memoirs or coming of age books, I really think this will be a book for everyone and I hope it also brings courage to people still in the community as well.

I knew very little about the Jehovah's Witness before I read this memoir. Ali Millar lays bare the the details of the the sect in a brave and profoundly moving way. She was born into the program as her mother had become a Witness before she was born, he mother uses it as a crutch and life is totally subsumed by the teachings.
Ali writes about early life as though the procession of meetings, knocking on doors to sell copies of Watertower, and the constant limiting of daily life by the elders was perfectly normal. Her enforced distance from many aspects of everyday life is shocking. Even when she rebels briefly as a teenager she is quickly pulled back in, leading to a long lasting mental illness which is largely ignored by those around her. A marriage to another Witness is unbearably sad, she isn't forced but given little choice and the marriage only increases her illness and isolation.
When she finally breaks away it is heartbreaking as she is forced to make the most unbearable of choices.
I urge everyone to read The Last Days, it is a searing indictment of the Jehovah's Witness, an unflinching picture of anorexia and in the end, a story of true courage.
Thank you to #netgalley #penguinrandom and#eburypublishing for allowing me to review this ARC

This memoir is a very well written and brutally honest read about a religion which is not too well understood by most people, including myself.
Her decision to leave must have been such a hard one for her to make, knowing the consequences of such! Always so interesting to read about the struggles people have within themselves and how it all transpires.
A huge thank you to the author for being so confident and brave in telling her story. Also many thanx to the publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this interesting book

A very powerful and gripping story that is difficult to read in some parts but worth sticking with. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Fascinating book and what an insight to a religion I knew nothing about. Your mum made me cry but I’m so glad that I’m the end you found the way for you.

What a ride Ali Millar has had in her life, and how brilliantly she writes about it. Her description of growing up with Jehovah’s Witnesses is moving and horrifying in equal measure and her treatment as an adult at the hands of the ‘elders’ is shocking. I am in awe of the bravery of her decision to leave the Witnesses after spending her whole life being indoctrinated at their hands. There are so many disturbing issues raised in this book, but the people least likely to read it are probably the Witnesses themselves, the rest of us can just be better informed about what goes on behind the closed doors of this sect, although it won’t make me any more willing to purchase their magazines when they come knocking on my door.

Such an intriguing coming of age story of a Scottish woman growing up in the Jehovah's Witnesses. These stories always interest me so much and I think Ali told her story so well and it was so captivating.

It’s always fascinating to read an account of a way of life that is closed to non-believers and this memoir is searingly honest about being a Jehovah’s Witness and trying to reconcile growing up and being a person. She makes us see why people join, the comfort of rules and rituals, but also the dark side of intolerance and tunnel vision. And the frightening visions of Jehovah and life and death that a child has to deal with. I hope Ali is strong enough to overcome her childhood and that her own family flourishes.

The Last Days is a very well written memoir of the authors life and experiences growing up as a Jehovah's Witness in Scotland. I knew virtually nothing of JW, their teachings or way of life before reading this book and I admit to being shocked at some of the extremely emotive scenes that Ali Millar describes. It's not an easy read but it's one that I'm glad to have read. Thank you for Ali for being brave and courageous in sharing you story. Thanks also to NetGalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for my honest review.

The Last Days – Ali Millar – this is a very moving memoir of a young women struggling with life as a Jehovah’s Witness and eventually leaving the religion. I found it a very insightful, whilst disturbing view of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There were some things I knew but others were a revelation to me. I felt shocked and saddened that a child then young adult’s severe mental illness could go unnoticed or even ignored for so long.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ebury Publishing, Penguin Random House for the review access.

The Last Days is a raw and honest memoir about the author’s childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness and the incredible turmoil her and her family went through in order to escape from them. Escape, being the operative word, as their hold on their members may not be physical but the emotional baggage makes leaving the Jehovah’s Witness faith (and some would label it a cult) almost impossible unless you are a very strong minded person and have some a very good support network to turn to.

Ali Millar’s true story will stay with me and I do hope that she is able to somehow reconcile the broken relationships that she has had to endure by her leaving, especially that with her mother. These are relationships that are not broken because of Ali’s doing but because of the harsh rules the Jehovah’s Witness organisation imposes on members who leave.

This is a very important story to tell and I commend Ali Millar on doing so and hopefully giving courage to others who are still enmeshed in the Jehovah’s Witness network who would like to escape.

With thanks to NetGalley and Ebury Publishing, Penguin Random House for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.