https://billingsgazette.com/entertainment/community/high-plains-book-awards-finalist-petting-tigers-my-life-as/article_df1bd1bb-7800-5385-aeb8-3845c1e6f8de.html
Shelley Smith Jones’ memoir, “Petting Tigers: My Life as a Witness of Jehovah,” is a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction category of the High Plains Book Awards. The title is taken from an appealing vision of Paradise that Smith Jones saw in a Jehovah Witness book when she was a child. It promised a paradise where the saved would play with tamed — previously wild — animals, and young Shelley dreamed of a heaven where she would pet the orange and black stripes of a tiger. Petting Tigers proceeds to detail Smith Jones’ life as a child, teenager, mother, and wife within the constraints of a religion variously called the Organization, the Truth, or Jehovah’s Witness, the...