One of Town & Country and Alta's Best Books of April
One of Oprah Daily's Best Books of Spring

“Terrifying, gripping, all true. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Stephen King

"Excellent ... told with rare sensitivity ... Hill is an extremely skilled writer, and his conscientious, measured reporting is a gift. He’s also a reliable guide who’s managed to create stunningly vivid scenes from the memories with which his subjects have trusted him ... The immediacy with which Hill portrays their conflicted longings gives the book the propulsive feel of a novel."
—New York Times Book Review

"The twists and turns Hill follows throughout this true story are extraordinary, and the author does a wonderful job of contextualizing the painful, sometimes horrifying choices his subjects made ... The Oracle's Daughter is a story about the terror of losing the self but it's also, gratifyingly, a story about finding the way back to it."
—NPR

"This true crime cult story opens with a scene straight from an action movie ... The Oracle's Daughter reads like immersive, on-the-ground reportage, charting how a small, idealistic community corrodes into a regime of cruelty, its practices so outlandish they’d feel invented if Hill didn’t render them with such concrete, lived-in specificity ... You come for the propulsive mother-daughter nightmare and the granular portrait of a survival in a closed world; you leave with a bracing sense of how mainstream the fringe can get."
—Oprah Daily, Best Books of Spring

“An incredible new book that cast some sort of inexplicable spell over me demanding I follow its read-me now orders.”
—CrimeReads

"Hill uses the story of this one isolated group to tell a much larger history, showing how the desires that drive cults to choose one's own spiritual destiny, to follow a charismatic leader rather than the established order, to cross into new territory and begin a new order, are the same forces that shaped the nation's origin story. Hill draws a clean line from founding era separatist heat through Mormonism, Shaker mysticism, Hippieism, and inevitably, Trumpism."
—NPR Weekly Reader

“With dogged research and rare access to victims and their stories, Harrison Hill has created a riveting portrait of one of the strangest American cults in recent memory. The Oracle’s Daughter takes the reader deep inside the female-led AMCTC, describing in harrowing detail the exorcisms and bizarre rituals while also laying bare the psychological and physical abuses inflicted by the cult’s autocratic leaders. With a cast of unforgettable characters—including courageous former cult members who broke free—the book offers compelling insights into the makings of religious cults and why their allure is increasing in our hyper-polarized, grievance-infused age.”
—Joby Warrick, author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 

“Harrison Hill’s The Oracle’s Daughter is a staggering achievement, synthesizing rigorous reportage, incisive cultural analysis, and a deeply compassionate gaze into a propulsive and unforgettable narrative. Its gaze is both intimate and expansive: attuned to the texture of individual lives even as it surveys the broad, unsettling sweep of American freedom. With nuance and integrity, Hill takes a story many people would feel more comfortable banishing to the fringe and instead asks us to see the ways it illuminates all of America.  All the way through, The Oracle’s Daughter is as gripping as it is humane; I picked it up and barely put it down until I’d finished. I'll carry this story with me always.” 
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

"From the opening scene of a young woman’s midnight escape from a religious cult run by her mother — that’s right, mom’s the messianic leader — unfolds a decades-long saga that reveals an America of both darkness and light. Troubling, uplifting, heartbreaking, unforgettable — tapping into seminal issues of our increasingly divided nation — Harrison Hill has written a masterwork of narrative nonfiction. A must-read."
—Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Hope in the Unseen and Life, Animated

“Harrison Hill's The Oracle’s Daughter does far more than delineate in vivid detail the alarming story of the Aggressive Christianity Mission Training Corps, surely one of the most frightening cults in modern religious history. Hill also provides essential cultural context, focusing not only on what happened involving that quasi-military group but also on how and why such a group can emerge. Anyone trying to understand religious cults should consider The Oracle’s Daughter required reading—it's that comprehensive and excellently written besides.”
—Jeff Guinn, author of Manson, The Road to Jonestown and Waco
 
“The Oracle’s Daughter is a propulsive reckoning with a mother, her daughter, and the extremism woven through the story of American religion. Beautifully told, un-put-downable, and urgently necessary, Hill offers a novelesque account of a cult that pushes beyond familiar narratives, asking us to consider just how far we truly are from the most radical edges of American life.”
—Heather Radke, author of Butts: A Backstory

"A hair-raising chronicle ... drawing on firsthand accounts and the history of fundamentalism, this rigorous study of religious abuse isn't easy to shake. Readers will be haunted."
—Publishers Weekly

"Hill is unsparing in his reportage. But more, he offers thoughtful notes on how cults work...A compelling study of the meeting of religious zealotry with the cult of personality."
—Kirkus

"An unsettling tale of a uniquely extremist American religious movement ... A chilling American “city upon a hill” narrative turned in on itself."
—Library Journal

“A deeply compelling experience… This thoughtful and absorbing work will appeal to readers drawn to explorations of religious extremism, such as Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) by Jon Krakauer and Breaking Free (2017) by Rachel Jeffs."
—Booklist