I was pretty much sold on the book blurb for The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir: Teenage Esther Hicks is a daughter on a Christian family reality show… and also secretly pregnant.

Essie’s mother has turned her husband’s ministry and their family (including fertility struggles, premature babies, and now new daughters-in-law) into Six for Hicks, a popular reality show, a growing congregation and a substantial income.  It’s hard not to see the Duggars in the growing brood of Christian reality TV stars and even in the language of courtship and publicly-performed service trips. (Have you seen the Duggar/fundamentalist homeschooling  documentary, Shiny Happy People? Dark look at that whole lifestyle and worldview,  with interview with people who lived it.)

Essie has grown up with constant cameras on her,  and readers can see how that’s affected her in a thousand ways. She doesn’t tell her mother that she’s expecting a baby, instead she fake-hides her pregnancy test someplace she knows her mother will find. Part of this story is just a fascinating look at lifestyle reality shows and an outwardly perfect family, and that alone would be a pretty great novel.  But I was very quickly drawn in by the characters. Essie and her “fiancé” Roarke are both realistic, complex teenagers in a wild and improbable situation, just trying to survive and still treat each other kindly.

As I write this, I realize this book is what I was looking for in The Infinite Pieces of Us. The similarities are really striking, from the themes of secret teen pregnancy, Christian respectability, small town gossip, right down to the pregnant protagonist’s name.

While outwardly behaving as a faithful daughter and bride-to-be for the cameras and gossip-mongers, Essie decides to turn her secret journals into a tell-all, describing life as a Six for Hicks daughter and admitting the truth about her pregnancy. Journo/producer Liberty Bell, herself a former child of a survivalist cult and bestselling memoir author, may be able to tell Essie’s story to the world, but there are consequences to revealing the truth.

The Book of Essie was a rare novel in which I wasn’t sure how the story was going to end. (When one reveal was completely unsurprising to me, Liberty also sighed and asked why people have to be so predictable.) It was great because I wasn’t sure until the very end whether or not Essie would get married, or whether she’d release her book, and how things could go if she did one or both of these things.

My submission for this month’s Booknificent linkup.