polygamy

The author, daughter of Mormon fundamentalist leader Rulon C. Allred, describes her childhood in a polygamous family, her father's assassination by a rival fundamentalist group, and her decision to lead a different sort of life.

A collection of fourteen essays that discuss various viewpoints on issues relevant to the subject of polygamy, and covers tolerance, freedom of choice, jealousy, legalization, womens' rights, and more.

Elissa Wall discusses her life growing up as a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, the trials she endured after the polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs forced her to marry her cousin at the age of fourteen, events that led to her leaving the church, and her decision to testify against Jeffs when he was brought to trial on charges of arranging marriages between adult male followers and underage girls.

In a polygamous cult in the desert, Kyra, not yet fourteen, sees being chosen to be the seventh wife of her uncle as just punishment for having read books and kissed a boy in violation of Prophet Childs' teachings, and is torn between facing her fate and running away from all that she knows and loves.

The author provides an account of her experiences as a member of a fundamentalist Mormon sect and the sixth wife, at age fifteen, of one of the group's leaders, providing insights into why people choose to be part of polygamist families, and why she decided to break from the group.

When Lassiter, a gunman with a reputation, rode into the Mormon village he found an angry mob. The object of their anger was the richest woman in town, who was unwilling to give up control of her spring water.

Carolyn Jessop recounts her involvement in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which forced her to become the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man before she managed to escape and expose the group and its practices, leading to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.

The author, nephew of Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, provides an inside account of what it was like to grow up in the prophet's compound, and shares his personal story of the challenges he faced after being expelled from the sect and forced out into a world he knew nothing about.

A story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families, the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters, the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle, she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another's lives. At the heart of it all are the two lives at stake, and like the best writers--think Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye--Jones portrays the fragility of these young girls with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women, just not as their mothers.

Follows the parallel stories of Ann Eliza Young, the estranged wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, and her campaign to end polygamy in the United States, and Jordan Scott, the son of a polygamist family in twenty-first-century Utah, who returns after years away from the fundamentalist sect to learn the truth about his father's death.