Krystin | TheF*ckingTwist's Reviews > The Family Next Door: The Heartbreaking Imprisonment of the Thirteen Turpin Siblings and Their Extraordinary Rescue

Book Blog | Bookstagram

I heard about the Turpins when they first made international news back in 2018 (which feels like 100 years ago, at this point,) but I obviously didn't pay enough attention to the whole story because the level of insanity is just jaw-dropping once all the details are laid out, as John Glatt does for you in this true-crime novel.

I mean honestly, this is some fucked up shit.

I must have brushed it off as just another set of weird religious parents doing weird shit to their kids in the name of their self-tailored beliefs. That is one way to chalk it up. But when we get into the real details, this is a banana-sandwich story turned up to eleven. Spinal Tap, amen.

If you're looking for a story on how Louise and David Turpin went from falling in love to popping out 13 kids who they would regularly beat and chain up to their beds, only freeing them to brush their teeth or use the bathroom, then this is the book for you.

But what this book won't tell you is the why. Where in the fresh hell does the desire to do this to your kids come from? There are some mentions of abuse running in the family, and even an obsession with becoming the next Duggars, but it's circumstantial. I wanted the real deep shit, you know what I mean?

Googling the why is difficult to do. I get a lot of statements about how they "didn't mean" to abuse their children, how they "love" their children and are sorry, but I can't find a concrete reason as to why a 29-year-old woman had to be rescued from her gross parents' house - described as being so dirty you couldn't breathe - weighing only 82 lbs and having not showered for a year.

Sometimes religious excuses for things trip me out. This is one of those times. And it's just not good enough.

I want to know the psychological reasons behind David and Louise Turpin's actions, but nothing is really ever presented. The author has a firm grasp of the timeline and the physical details, but the book lacked psychology and emotion.

While the story itself is insane, gripping, stunning and heart-wrenching, all of that was missing from the writing, skating by purely because the details allowed it to. It doesn't provide the kind of insight I would want from a book like this.

But, shoutout for not underplaying the bowl-cut family hairstyle at all, because damnnnnnn, I looked that up too and it's easily one of the most disturbing elements of this family saga.

Honestly, if you can read the news, you can get this book for free. It needed interviews, quotes and first-hand detail to really make it worth the reader's time. Everything in here comes across as second-hand information and literally, the last half of the book is just court transcripts written out into digestible chunks.

Still, this could not be any more fucked up.


⭐⭐½ | 2.5 stars rounded down