A review by fleeno
The House of My Mother by Shari Franke

5.0

 

Shari Franke’s childhood was miserable yet filmed for the world to consume and enjoy. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code which quickly grew into emotional abuse, all while maintaining the image of a picture-perfect family for their YouTube channel 8 Passengers. The channel documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for 2.5 million subscribers. Private moments of the children's lives were recorded and put out for the world to see. Shari and her siblings were forced to essentially work, create content, act, and manage their social media from a young age. Without social media Ruby would likely have still been a terrible and abusive parent but with social media she became connected to Jodi Hildebrandt and together they promoted a weird matriarchal cult which encouraged strict parenting, their techniques eventually ending in multiple counts of child abuse. Shari now uses her platform to raise awareness of child safety issues and its commendable that through the book she talks of her own experiences and does not name her siblings or what happened to them, allowing them at least a piece of privacy. The book does raise interesting points about child safety and family vloggers and I suspect this may be the first but not the last memoir we see from a child of family vlogging.