On a spring day in 2001, a couple brought their 6-year-old granddaughter, Haley, on a hike with friends to Cave Mountain, in Arkansas\u2019 Buffalo National River Wilderness. As author Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, 2011) relates, this was followed was the largest manhunt in the state\u2019s history. Days after being found by locals, Haley told of another young girl who kept her company while lost in the thick foliage of the Ozarks. Unbeknownst to the family at the time, another girl had gone missing in those woods nearly 30 years earlier, when a small cult fled to the mountain in fear of a foretold apocalypse. What begin as intriguing true-crime tales shift into a psychological deconstruction and a philosophical journey attempting to understand the power that religion\u2014specifically Christianity\u2014possesses to influence one\u2019s perception of themselves and reality. Those close to the events, as well as many online onlookers, insist that an angel or ghost of the missing girl helped Haley survive. Although Haley herself doesn\u2019t label her encounter as one thing or another, the author suggests that the power\u2014and insistence\u2014of one\u2019s own belief holds its own kind of power: \u201cA ghost haunts not when it manifests visibly right before our eyes, rattling chains and moaning our names, but when it evades us, when it stays just out of sight, when we think we just saw it flit past a window.\u201d Thus begins a spiraling account, overflowing with repetitive backtracking and tangential crossroads. Digging through mounds of internal reflection on his own relationship with organized religion, as well as interviews of those connected to the cult, Hale eventually concludes, \u201cAs in all things, Christianity\u2019s power lies in narrative, and the Christian who believes and has always believed has no story arc. It is the prodigal son, not the faithful one, who needs redemption. Doubt is the essence of faith.\u201d Readers looking for a story thick with deeper ruminations underneath an intriguing true-crime narrative will be satisfied, if not a bit glassy-eyed, by the final page.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On a spring day in 2001, a couple brought their 6-year-old granddaughter, Haley, on a hike with friends to Cave Mountain, in Arkansas\u2019 Buffalo National River Wilderness. As author Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, 2011) relates, this was followed was the largest manhunt in the state\u2019s history. Days after being found by locals, Haley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}