**I received a copy of this book via the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Any thoughts and opinions are my own.**
Warning: This is going to be a negative review.
I do not like doing negative reviews. To date I think I only have two negative reviews posted on this actual blog. I usually save negative reviews for Goodreads/NetGalley. But, in this case I feel like I need to post about this book and why I am giving it a negative review. I actually threw this book away. I am one of the most enraged people when I hear about someone just throwing a book away but I threw this one in the trash with no hesitation. That is how much I hated this book.
I would have rather read Fifty Shades of Grey in Russian sitting naked on an ice cube in the North Pole while getting a root canal than to ever read this book again.
If you've seen some of my other reviews on here or Goodreads, at some point I've reviewed other Christian books and I even mention my own faith. Let me start this out by saying I am NOT a perfect Christian and I do not pretend to be one. I'm an ugly sinner just like everyone else. This is not a post to be pious.
I was really excited to have the opportunity to read this book. I first learned about Annie Lobert and Hookers For Jesus a few years back when my husband and I were watching a documentary about the sex industry. The whole idea seemed really great to me and I thought it was something that was an opportunity to be an amazing ministry and way to reach a lot of people that most churches shun should they attempt to darken a church door. I am a sucker for a powerful testimony and I love seeing how far people have come from where they were before their relationship with God. It's an amazing, emotional blessing to see God working in others' lives. I thought I was going to be reading a story about redemption and how she found her way to God and how she's now helping other women who are hurting, struggling, aching for God in their lives. This was not the story I got.
I knew that I was going to be getting Annie's history at the beginning of this book. That is how most books like this begin. You need to know the sinner in order to appreciate the saint. Within the first two chapters of the book I was already starting to lose interest because she immediately starts blaming other people for her poor life choices. I'm okay with people making bad mistakes in their lives. I've made plenty. But I accept responsibility for my actions. I've had some pretty dark things happen to me in my life that weren't necessarily my "fault" but had I made better decisions I wouldn't have gotten myself in those situations to begin with. Annie blaming the fact that her father was strict and didn't often physically show affection as part of her reason to become a hooker just left a bad taste in my mouth. And then she compounded that blame onto past boyfriends. She slept with her first serious boyfriend and he didn't want anything to do with her afterwards, so she became a hooker. She went to wild college parties and got completely trashed and had drunk sex with random men, so she became a hooker. She and her best friend went to this nightclub and met an older man who looked like he had lots of money, so she became a hooker.
The last one is what really got to me. She mentions in the book that she flies to Hawaii to see her best friend after her best friend starts dating this older man and before she even got on the plane she knew she was going to be hooking in Hawaii. I tried to go with it. There are a lot of women who do porn just because they enjoy it. No one enticed them, they made up their own minds. Women's lib! I thought after the first mention of this, it would quickly progress into "I was a hooker, I got into some bad stuff, I found Jesus, and now I'm helping other hookers find Jesus, Amen." (A little simplistic, but you get the point.) Instead, the first TEN chapters of this book went on and on about she was such an amazing hooker and was soooooo good at what she did that she was pulling in all of this money and she was practically sleeping on stacks of dollar bills because she was such a hot, amazing hooker. I wish I were exaggerating this, but I'm not. She literally spent ten whole chapters talking about what an awesome hooker she was. And how much money she made. And then talked about her abusive boyfriend who beat the crap out of her in front of people more than once and once beat her so bad that she couldn't work as an awesome hooker and stayed in a bed for weeks trying to re-cooperate. Pimp was cutting into her money. This guy loooved her so much that he shoved her face in dog crap. And what did she do? Stayed. But why did she stay? Not because she "loved" him as she claims. If you read a few sentences past the "but I loved him's", you'll see that she stayed with him because he had all of her fancy jewelry and she wanted it back. She actually LEFT him and then went back because she wanted the jewelry.
So, this book rocks on...more awesome hooker-y stuff until she talks about her sister's death and her self getting sick with cancer. Somewhere in the midst of this she had already made a "deal" with God that she would straighten her life up if he would help her. God followed through, she didn't. (Haven't we all done this? The "spare-tire" religion promise?) I thought, "FINALLY, I can relate to her!" I've been there in those dark moments begging for God to help and promising something that I knew I wasn't really going to deliver on. I don't know many people who haven't. But here's where the book got weird for me on a Christian stand-point. She talks about seeing her sister's ghost and some other strange things happening in her sister's house after her sister died. And that's what brought her to Jesus, again. That's not a Biblical thing so I'm not really sure if she dreamed (she swears she was awake) or if she hallucinated it out of exhaustion and grief. The other thing that got me was her saying that she received the Holy Spirit before she accepted Jesus into her heart. That's definitely not Biblical. And then stops hooking, because she's straightening her life up, right? But then she starts stripping because that's not the same thing as hooking and she can still make big bucks. And then she goes back to hooking because she needs to make more money because now she is sick and she can't get a regular job with benefits because hooking pays way more money for less hours so she can just hook her way through cancer treatment and then give it up once she's better. Logic. She even goes to meet "Johns" with open wounds from her chemo radiation because she would rather not go and get a real job with health benefits because she makes so much money hooking. Oh and at this point she's been hooking for 15+ years but not because she's being forced into it. It's because she likes the money. Money, money, money was also a main theme for the majority of the book.
Somewhere in the midst of all of that she also gets with a guy who tells her she doesn't have to be a hooker anymore and that he will take care of her. So she stops hooking again. But then she starts gambling. And then goes back to hooking so that she can pay off her gambling debts. Her boyfriend finds out and instead of being mad, he just makes her promise not to do it again and they go back to their normal lives. But then they both make a bad business deal and lose a lot of money and are about to lose the "castle" that she lives in so she gets hooked on cocaine. And in order to hide the fact that she's on cocaine she starts hooking again to pay for it so that her boyfriend doesn't know. And then somewhere in there she just decides one day that she's not going to do it anymore and she gets right with God again. It was such a quick progression that I almost missed it.
And then we get into her pursuit for a rich husband. And the fact that she prayed to God to send her husband almost immediately after she got saved. A rich husband because men are supposed to provide for their wives and she shouldn't have to work. Or something like that. And so she landed a "rock star", Oz Fox, whom most people of my generation have never even heard of. (I actually had to ask my husband who he was.) But instead of being incredibly grateful that God did in fact send her a rich husband, she went straight into talking about how great it was for her to have married a rock star because she's always wanted to make music (I forgot to mention that she bragged about hanging out with Prince in the beginning of the book) and that being married to a rock star would help her live out that dream. Never once does she give God any credit for any of this. It's all about making more money.
And then finally we get to the part about salvation and giving your life to God. If you blink, sneeze, drop the book, etc., you will miss it. It was very disappointing because Ms. Lobert had a real opportunity to reach a lot of people that mainstream churches do not reach. And there are a lot of people in this world who, when debating about whether to give their lives to God, will read books like this to see how God has worked in their lives. First-time Christians probably aren't going to get much out of this one.
Let's go over what I DID learn from this book:
- Hookers in Hawaii can make a lot of money if they go after all of the Asian businessmen because they are not intimidating and they are usually smaller in stature so you can give them a beat down if they try anything funny.
- If you're blonde, have long legs, and look younger than you really are, you will make A LOT of money being a hooker.
- Hooking makes you a lot of money but eventually a Pimp will "break" you and you will have to give him all of your money.
- If you decide not to give him all of your money and become a "rogue" hooker, you're going to have a bad time.
- If a pimp has all of your expensive jewelry, you should go back to him and be his "bottom chick" again so that you can get your jewelry back. It doesn't matter if he beats you.
- Buy a condo, let said pimp move himself and his other hoes in and then just leave.
- Cancer is not a reason to stop hooking.
- When asked why you started hooking, blame everyone but yourself.
- Get a rich husband who just happens to be a rock star with music connections so that you can finally record your own album since you didn't get to record one with Prince because your friends were concerned about your hooking.
- If I want to make a lot of money in a short period of time, I should become a hooker.
- If I need a lot of money, I should become a hooker.
- If I want to know how to be an awesome, amazing, super hooker, I should look up Annie Lobert because that's what her book is about.
- If I want to sell a book about what an awesome hooker I was, I should throw in the last few pages something about God.
That last bullet point. That's how I feel about this entire book. I do not feel like Annie Lobert was genuine in anything that she wrote in this book in regards to trying to turn people on to a relationship with God. I know as a Christian you aren't supposed to judge people. It's something I struggle with every day. Even this post, it's hard not to pass judgement on her as a write this review because this book was essentially about her life. If I look at this book as a work of fiction, it would basically be eyeroll after eyeroll of "seriously?", "you've got to be kidding me!", "how many more tropes can you throw in here to make it even more fantastical?". This isn't a book to bring people to God. As a matter of fact, if I didn't already know something about God and Christianity, I wouldn't even want to be a Christian after reading about how amazing and glamorous her life was before Christ. It honestly felt like she just wanted to write a book about her amazing hooker life and thought she would sell more books if she used the Christian angle. Very disappointed.
I give it negative 5 "nope, it's in the trash" stars.
