Worldly Girls

by Tamara Jong

A Quietly Powerful Story About Leaving the Church, Losing a Parent, and Finding Your Voice

ARC Review
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Release Date: September 9, 2025
Format: ARC (Print)

I didn’t expect to love this one. The first few pages are heavy with scripture, religious jargon, doctrine and I almost stepped back. But I’m glad I didn’t. It’s not there to convert you. It’s there to show you what she lived inside of.

Worldly Girls is a memoir about losing your religion and figuring out who you are without it. But it’s also about addiction, grief, racial identity, and complicated family ties. Tamara Jong writes with clarity and deep emotion, peeling back layers of a childhood shaped by a mother who found (and was later rejected by) the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a father who left the chaos but left her behind, too.

The author was baptized Catholic and brought into the JW faith by her mother — who, struggling with addiction, seemed to find her next fix in strict religion. When the church eventually shunned her for smoking, the daughter stayed in. For a while. Her slow detachment from the church and the reprocessing of her past, is one of the strongest arcs in the book.

What stood out to me most wasn’t just what she lived through, but how she processed it, with music, TV shows, blunt humor, and an almost raw kind of reflection. I don’t tag books, ever. I tagged this one 15 times.

“If we were created in God’s image, why did Eve have to suffer more? If that’s not passive-aggressive anger, then I don’t know what is.”

She talks about growing up mixed-race in a family and church that didn’t have the tools to hold that. About chicken feet. About Rihanna. About what it means to rewrite the stories you were told about yourself.

Yes, there’s a lot of scripture here. But it fades as the book goes on, like it fades from her life. It’s not dogma. It’s context. You feel the weight of it, but you also feel her stepping out from under it.

Would I Recommend It?

Absolutely, for quiet memoir readers, former church kids, or anyone who’s trying to piece together who they are after the structures they were raised in fall away. I’d let readers know upfront that it includes references to doctrine and faith, but they’re part of the arc. Not the point, just part of the story.

Thank you to Book*hug Press and River Street Writing for the ARC and the opportunity to read this early.

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