Love Reading UK, August 12, 2021
Review by Joanne Owen
An unflinchingly honest, deeply personal account of a troubled teen girl’s indoctrination to white supremacy – and her walk away from it.
Told in engaging, personable style by mother and daughter, Jeanette and Lauren Manning’s Walking Away from Hate is a powerful, un-put-down-able account of a teenager being drawn into criminality, violence and extreme white supremacy through an online recruiter. In Jeanette’s words, “this is the story of Lauren’s journey from ordinary kid into the world of hate and white supremacist ideology, but it’s also the story of a newly-widowed single parent who had to learn the most difficult lesson of all – how to keep the door open”.
Indeed, one of this memoir’s defining, pervasive powers is the dual mother-daughter narrative that relates how Lauren was drawn into this appalling ideology and situation, how her family struggled with it, and how – ultimately – she came back from the brink. It’s a brave book, suffused in unwavering honesty.
