This True Crime Book Was So Unnerving and I Absolutely Devoured It
Today’s book recommendation is a newer true crime release that got really dark in ways I did not expect and I was absolutely enthralled by it. The author, Leah Sottile, is an investigative journalist and podcast host. Before reading this book, I was just surface-level aware of the new-age-to-white-supremacy pipeline (which is adjacent to the wellness-trad-wife-white-supremacy pipeline). After reading this book, I now know enough for it to be almost nightmare-inducing.
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile
Love Has Won is the name of the new age cult that is the focus of this book. It’s the story of Amy, her metamorphosis into Mother God (as she called herself and made others call her), and her founding of this cult. The events in this book are very recent, as in within the past decade. We also get to see the rampant spread of this cult online and the detailing of how the disinformation disseminated so frighteningly quickly and widely was horrifying. The author does an excellent job of describing where people were at when they discovered this information—their loneliness, their feelings of being outsiders, their constant search for meaning, and their belief that there is something bigger. The Love Has Won cult offered responses and remedies for all of this.
Another thing the author does with this book that I deeply appreciate is add over a century and a half of context. At the core of a number of new age lies, including the ones on which Love Has Won was based, is a debunked theory from an 1860s British zoologist. The author starts there, and as you read, you really get a sense of how things quickly spun out of control. There is also information about historical spiritualists and self-professed new age gurus and how their legacy has reached forward into the present, as well as ones still living today.
Love Has Won, the first iteration with Amy living as Mother God, was not long-lasting but there are still a number of spin-off groups thriving today which, again, is really unnerving. It is not a spoiler that Amy dies and it is gruesome—not gorey violent, but very dark. Because this is such a recent thing and there was a three-part documentary on these events in 2023, the author was able to interview a lot of people, including some of Amy’s actual family.
There are many content warnings for this book: alcoholism, child abuse, verbal, emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, antisemitism, and possibly more. This book was a lot to handle, especially as someone who doesn’t usually read true crime, yet I absolutely devoured it.
That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
Find me on Book Riot, the All the Books podcast, and Bluesky.
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The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
This week, we’re highlighting the best new poetry collections of 2025 (so far)! From the from deeply personal to powerfully political, many of these collections reflect the zeitgeist and introduce some fresh voices in poetry. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
How is it that we’re already more than a quarter of the way through 2025? I’m ahead of my reading goals and still feel so far behind at the same time. I’ve packed in plenty of poetry, though, finding lots of wonderful and surprising voices emerging. It’s early, but totally time to check in with some of the best new poetry collections of 2025 so far.
It’s funny how timely these collections are. Keep in mind that publishing moves VERY SLOWLY, so books that have been released in the first quarter of 2025 were probably completed in late 2023 or early 2024, only seeing the light of day recently. So, these collections were written in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. Nevertheless, many of these collections feel like guttural reactions to the world right now. Amazing how prescient art and artists can be, huh?
These poetry collections run the gamut from deeply personal to powerfully political. Let’s face it, those two are often the same anyway, particularly when it comes to poetry. Most exciting to me are how many of these best new poetry collections of 2025 so far are fresh voices to the poetic scene. Let’s dig into those collections, shall we?
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