This book follows the Parker siblings, a devout Christian family’s children whose lives are shaped in secret by a theology of pain.
On the outside, the Parkers look like a model church family. Jackson, 17, Augustine, 16, Sophiannia, 15, and Sarrialinn, 14, sit straight in the pew, know all the right verses, and bow their heads when their father Collin prays. No one in the congregation sees how those same verses are twisted at home into weapons that sanction bare skin, belts, paddles, and canes.
Told in alternating points of view between Augustine and Sarrialinn, the story opens in their mid–teens, then pulls back in raw flashbacks to reveal how early it began. Jackson was only five when he hit four year old Augustine over a toy and earned his first bare spanking over Collin’s knee. Fifteen hard blows, delivered in cold anger, sear a lesson into him that will repeat for years. What the boys do not yet understand is that the “lesson” is not about love at all. It is about control.
Their mother died when they were still tiny, her funeral a blurred memory of a small room, stiff black clothes, and a father whose face did not crack. The children remember almost nothing of her except a faint sense that she was softer, gentler, a presence that might have been a shield. Without her, Collin’s grief hardens into fury, and the Bible becomes his justification.
By the time they are teenagers, Jackson and Sarrialinn bear the brunt of his anger. Jackson is the eldest, the one Collin insists must be “broken” so the others will learn. Sarrialinn, the youngest, is branded “disrespectful” for the smallest look, the slightest hesitation. Her punishments are the longest and the hardest. Collin tells himself he is saving her soul. The marks on her body tell another story.
At the center of the book is the night Sarrialinn commits what Collin calls “the unforgivable sin” in their household: using the Lord’s name in vain. Terrified, she knows at once what it will cost her. This time, it will not be only her father’s hand. In a ritualized display of control framed as “biblical discipline,” each of her siblings will be ordered to take part.
Across four unflinching chapters, the book walks through the entire ordeal. First Jackson, then their father, then Sophiannia, and finally Augustine, each wielding a different object: belt, wooden spoon, paddle, cane. Sarrialinn must bare herself, bend, and count every single stroke out loud. At the beginning her voice is steady, clinging to the task as if sheer compliance can limit the damage. As the beating goes on and her skin turns an angry maroon, her counting dissolves into sobs and gasps, each number dragged out of her through shock and humiliation.
No one dares intervene. The siblings have all learned that any plea for mercy risks drawing the belt onto their own backs. Her only comfort comes later, in the quiet.
Augustine, who never cries during his own punishments, is the one who lifts his shattered little sister into his arms when it is finally over. In a painful echo of what his older brother once did for him, he holds her against his chest while she trembles, applies cooling gel to the welts on her raw skin, and speaks to her in a low, steady voice. He is honest about what he sees and about what he has endured himself. He does not minimize the pain or the wrongness. He simply refuses to leave her alone in it.
The story does not turn away from the brutality. Sarrialinn’s welts are so raised that Augustine knows they must be treated. In one of the most haunting scenes in the book, he calmly explains to her, step by step, that if he does not lance them with a needle, they will harden and ache for far longer. He tells her exactly how much it will hurt, what he will do, and why. She hates needles, trembles and cries, but she also trusts him. That fragile trust, born in the heart of abuse, becomes the seed of something different: a love that heals instead of punishes.
The siblings’ entanglement in the violence is not simple obedience. At sixteen, Augustine is already trapped between being a victim and being turned into an instrument. When his turn comes during Sarrialinn’s punishment, Collin orders him to use an object rather than his hand. Augustine cannot refuse without drawing another storm onto himself, but he quietly adjusts the force of each blow, giving as little as he dares. Collin sees the outward compliance and lets it pass. Augustine’s small act of mercy does not spare him from later retribution.
After Sarrialinn has finally cried herself to sleep, Collin summons Augustine to his room. Jackson is there, ashen, clearly sick at being involved yet too controlled by fear to defy their father. In a chilling mirror of what just happened to his sister, Augustine is forced to bare himself and accept twenty strokes with the belt and twenty with the paddle, delivered by Collin and Jackson, for the “sin” of holding back. He counts each blow in a steady voice and refuses to let Collin see him cry. The tears do not come until later, in the dark, when Jackson wraps his arms around him and tells him he does not have to be strong.
Threaded through these scenes is a simple phrase that becomes the siblings’ private lifeline: “Always and forever, family above all.” Jackson first whispers it years earlier, when they are still children and he is comforting Augustine after a severe beating Sarrialinn never knew about. He says it through his own tears, not as a command but as a promise. Over the years, that sentence turns into a secret creed. The parents never use it. It belongs to the children alone.
In the present timeline, after Sarrialinn’s worst punishment, the four of them meet in the one place in the world that still belongs only to them: a weathered tree house they built together in the backyard. Hidden under the leaves, away from their father’s eyes and the church’s blind praise, they finally speak the truth aloud.
They talk about specific spankings that linger in their minds, about what it felt like to be stripped and ordered to present themselves, about the shame of being forced to stand in front of brothers and sisters while an adult’s theology turned their pain into a lesson. They name the objects that have carved their childhoods into fear. They say out loud what they once could only feel: this is not God. This is not love.
At the same time, the book refuses to flatten their faith into caricature. Some of the concepts that might normally be tied to specific Christian teachings appear in distorted form here, explicitly so that later attribution can draw clear lines between healthy belief and the way Collin weaponizes scripture. Augustine and Sarrialinn wrestle with the difference between the God they were taught to fear and the quieter, softer God they hope might exist beyond their father’s voice. One sibling is close to losing faith altogether. Another clings to it, desperate to separate the sacred from the cruelty.
In the tree house, they also talk about the future. One day they will leave this house. One day they might have children of their own. The horror of what they have lived through shapes a detailed, almost ritualistic vow about what they will never do.
They lay it all out. No baring their children. No using belts, paddles, spoons, or canes. No forcing siblings to punish each other. No making a child recite verses as if scripture were a knife. No calling cruelty “love” in God’s name. They talk through alternatives they have only glimpsed in other families: taking away privileges, assigning chores that repair damage instead of inflicting it, talking long and calmly instead of yelling, cooling off instead of hitting in anger.
Together, they create a pact that is both desperate and precise. Any one of them who, as an adult, begins to sound or act like their father will face all the others. They even set a number, mirroring the brutality they’ve known: forty strokes per sibling with whatever object that sibling chooses. It is a punishment so severe that they all go quiet hearing themselves say it. They do not intend cruelty toward each other. They intend a terrifying safeguard. If fear kept them silent as children, they now want fear of this promise to keep them from ever becoming what they hated.
Even as they speak, Augustine hesitates. Somewhere in his mind, he knows that answering violence with more violence is not the real answer. Yet in this moment, with their own backs still burning and their skin still marred, they lack another language for accountability. What matters most is that they are not pledging to repeat what was done to them. They are pledging to stop it at any cost.
The story’s final pages move forward in time, showing the fruit of that night. The siblings do break the cycle. They grow into adults who still carry scars, both visible and hidden, but they direct their pain into tenderness instead of rage.
One is shown kneeling in front of a sobbing child, not to pull them over a knee but to meet their eyes. The child has just shouted something ugly in anger. In the Parker house of the past, that would have meant a bare bottom and a belt. In this new house, it means a calm talk, a clear boundary, loss of a privilege. There is no Bible on the table. There is simply a parent’s steady hand on a small shoulder and the quiet sentence, “We will talk about this, but I will not hurt you.”
Another scene shows the four siblings reunited with all their children around them. There is a new tree house now, a deliberate echo and a reclamation of what once was only a hiding place. Kids clamber up and down the ladder, shouting and laughing. No one is afraid of being called inside for “correction.” No one flinches when a grown up raises their voice to get their attention.
Standing beneath the tree, Augustine and Sarrialinn share a look that holds every memory and every vow. Jackson, now a father himself, scoops his own child up and holds them close while the little one cries over some small injustice. He does not talk about sin. He does not lecture. He simply repeats the words that carried them all through the darkest years, but now they mean something utterly different, something safe.
“Always and forever,” he whispers into his child’s hair, “family above all.”
This book is not about whether Christian faith is good or bad. It is about what happens when fear and shame are wrapped in holy language, when a parent’s unresolved grief becomes a hurricane inside a home, and when children are taught to confuse pain with righteousness. It is about the unseen reality that abuse can exist in families who pray, read scripture, and receive praise for their “well behaved” kids.
Most of all, it is about the fierce, stubborn love of siblings who refuse to let their story end where it began. Even Christians can be abused. Even within the most devout walls, cruelty can hide. Yet even there, tenderness can survive, whispered under quilts and in tree houses, carried forward in promises and in the simple act of choosing to hold a child instead of hitting them.
Always and Forever, Family Above All is a stark, emotionally intense portrait of hidden violence and quiet resistance. It will resonate with readers who have seen faith misused, who know what it is to grow up afraid of the people who say they love you most, and who still dare to believe that their own homes, their own families, can become places of safety instead.
