Nonfiction Book Reviews

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For my honors class in college, a speaker came in and talked to the class about something you don’t normally hear about much: Slavery right here and now, in the year 2009.

Unfortunately, I missed class that day, so I didn’t get to hear him speak. As make-up work for missing the class, I was assigned a video to watch on this global pandemic. I have posted the video below for all of you to watch.

WARNING: This video will make you sick to your stomach, not so much because of the graphic pictures in the video (although there is a little of that) but because of the realization that all of this has been happening, and you have done nothing to stop it.  At just over 5 minutes, it is well worth your time to watch.

After watching that video, I wanted to know what I could do. I also wanted to find more information on the subject, since this was literally the first time I had heard about this. Slavery? Here in America? C’mon, what are you talking about? Slavery was abolished! President Lincoln? Emancipation Proclamation? Doesn’t any of that ring a bell?

Yeah, that was me. I was shocked and disturbed to the tips of my toes that this was still happening today. I went to Amazon to see if I could find a book with more information on modern-day human slavery, and I found Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade - and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone.  I just finished reading it today.  Batstone is the head of a website, Not For Sale Campaign, and now does tours around the United States speaking about human trafficking.

The book Not for Sale was an eye-opening look at all the forms of human slavery, from women being forced to serve as sex slaves in a brothel, to whole families being locked inside of a rice factory for years, to children being forced to fight as soldiers in rebel armies in Africa.  There doesn’t seem to be a corner of the world that is not affected in some shape or form by this.

The book did have some ADD tendencies to it, however.  The author would start out a chapter talking about sex slavery in Asian countries, and throughout the chapter would jump from the story of someone who was forced into slavery, to a person who is fighting it as an abolitionist however they can (by providing aid to those who escape, by helping people escape, by providing legal representation to those who escaped, etc), and then on to the general landscape of the problem - why it is thriving, what has made it hard to fight, etc.

Each new section within the chapter meant a jump to a new point of view on the problem, and he regularly jumped back and forth between the different point of views until wrapping up the chapter (usually) with the escape and freedom of the slave.

When I first started reading, I thought, “Who is this?  What is he talking about?  What happened to the person whose story he just left?”  After I read through several chapters and got more used to this writing style, it didn’t bother me as much, but I still cannot say it’s my favorite writing style, and I wish he had done it differently.

Despite this minor flaw, the book was still excellent.  If you want a broad overview of the worldwide problem of human trafficking, then this is the book for you.  If you are outraged by the video above and you want more information and you especially want to know what you can do to make a difference, then you need to read this book.  This is an excellent introduction into the world of slavery, and will help you better understand the global dynamics of it.

At the end of the book, he has a listing of the various agencies fighting this problem along with their websites so you can find a group nearby that you can join to help fight this.  Don’t think this problem exists in your backyard?  Check out Slavery Map, where you can search the globe and see where the various incidents have happened.  I had two in my state alone.

There are books that make you laugh, there are books that teach you stuff.  There are books that broaden your horizons.  But Not For Sale will change your life.  Buy it today.  After you’re done reading, pass it on to a friend or neighbor, and encourage them to continue passing it on when they’re done.  The more we know about this problem, the better we can fight it.  Knowledge is everything.

If you don’t see it, then you aren’t looking for it.
~ modern slavery in a nutshell

Havs

PS My hometown is going to get a visit from David Batstone and his entourage very soon.  If any of you who are reading this are from my hometown and want more information, call me or send me an email and I’ll gladly give you the info.  I’d love to post it here but for privacy reasons will not.

I picked up Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand while doing check-in.  When I saw the book, I thought, “I’ve always wanted to read that book.  I wonder if I should take it home with me.”  Within seconds, I was pulling another copy of the book out of the book drop.

“Hmm…” I thought.  “Kinda weird two people would return the same book on the same day.”  And then I pulled out another copy.  And another.  All together, I pulled out seven copies of that book - I’m guessing that some local group got together and read it as a book of the month or something. ??? But I took it as a sign that I ought to get my rear in gear and read this book that was apparently so good, they just had to make it into a movie.

Now that I’ve read Seabiscuit, I understand why it became a Hollywood blockbuster.  This book is absolutely fantastic.  The writing is superb, the pictures are terrific (I read the “Special Illustrated Collector’s Edition” which I highly recommend - the pictures definitely added something special to the book) and the pacing impeccable.

By the end of the book, I felt like I knew Seabiscuit as well as an old friend.  And when he died (sorry if I ruined the ending there, but this story did take place in the ’30s) I cried.  I know that’s rather ridiculous (what was I expecting to have happen?) but it’s just that this horse had so much spirit, it was heart-breaking to finally say goodbye to him.

One thing that made this book so fantastic is that it wasn’t just about Seabiscuit.  It was also about the Great Depression, about horseracing, about what it takes to be a jockey, and especially about the people around Seabiscuit, who saw his true potential.  Seabiscuit was doomed to a life of obscurity, until these men saw something in him that no one else did.  I felt like I got to know the men who loved Seabiscuit, and came to love them too.

A couple of things to keep in mind: I don’t particularly count myself as a huge horse lover.  My grandfather had horses that I rode as a child, and they were quite simply some of the orneriest things you’d ever come across.  I got stepped on and thrown off more times than I care to count.  So yes, you can love this book even if you don’t love horses.

Secondly, I have never watched Seabiscuit the movie, so I did not pick up the book with preconceived notions.  Since I have never paid attention to the world of horse racing before, I knew almost nothing about Seabiscuit.

So if even someone like me (with little knowledge or understanding of horses, horse racing, or Seabiscuit in particular) could absolutely love and adore this book, it seems like pretty much anyone could.

Now I just need to watch the movie.  While I’m watching Seabiscuit, I also need to watch Marley and Me, another book that I’ve read and reviewed that’s been turned into a movie.   I really loved Marley the book, so I’m hoping I’ll love the movie just as much.

As for Seabiscuit: An American Legend I give it an easy 5 out of 5 stars.  Heck, I should probably give it a couple of extra stars just ’cause.  If you haven’t read Seabiscuit yet, you need to.  It is easily one of the best books I’ve read in the past year.

Hava

I had heard about The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls from SmallWorld Reads (another book blog), who highly recommended it.  It turns out that Glass Castle was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, and yet I had never heard of it until SmallWorld mentioned it.  Don’t ask me where I’ve been.

Now that I’ve finally read it, I can see why SmallWorld (and the rest of the world, incidentally) loved it so much.  This autobiography reminded me in some ways of Three Weeks with my Brother by Nicholas Sparks.  Both sets of parents had an “interesting” outlook on parenting (basically, let the kids do whatever they wanted, as long as it didn’t actually kill anyone else) and they were both raised in extreme poverty.  But while Nicholas’ parents at least tried to feed and clothe their children, Jeannette’s parents didn’t always even do that.

This is an honest and open memoir - the some of the things that Jeannette went through as a child makes your heart hurt.  Her parents, at many points during her childhood, did not provide even the most basic of necessities - food, clothing, and at some points, shelter.  Yet unlike A Child Called It, where this is because the parent is trying to torture the child, in Glass Castle it is more simply because the parents are free-spirits, with a distinct lack of planning skills.  Oh, and the father is an alcoholic who drinks most of their money away.

At one point, a family member dies, leaving the parents with a house and quite a bit of money.  I was cheering for the family at this point - surely they would use this money to actually get ahead in life, right?  But even as I was cheering for them, I knew it wouldn’t happen.  The parents are beyond irresponsible, and sure enough, the money soon disappeared. The house fell into major disrepair, and they eventually left and moved back East, leaving the house empty behind them.

The most mind-boggling part of the book is that Jeannette clearly loves her parents.  Even though they leave her and her siblings nothing to eat at various times (forcing Jeannette to eat butter for dinner at one point) and even though their parenting style is far beyond neglectful, into the realm of outright child abuse, Jeannette seems to have been able to look back on her life and appreciate the good parts about her parents, and the things they tried to do for their children.

I think this is what makes this memoir so wonderful - it is not bitter or hateful in any way.  She loves her parents, warts and all.  It is a testament to the human spirit that she could endure something like this, and still look back on it all with love for her parents.

Despite this upbringing (or perhaps in some ways, because of it) Jeannette became quite successful in the news world, eventually becoming a columnist for MSNBC.com, until she decided to take a break and just write books for a while.  If you’re interested in more information about Glass Castle, then you’ll definitely want to check out this interview done with Jeannette Walls (warning: It’s long!) where she talks about her parents, the book, and the impact it’s had on her life.

Glass Castle was a terrific memoir - one of the best I’ve read.  I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.  If you’re one of the few people left who haven’t read this book, go check it out.  You won’t regret it.

Hava

I picked up Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches for Teach for America by Donna Foote on a whim.  I had heard about Teach for America in passing a long time ago, but I would have been hard pressed to say anything more than it was some sort of organization that took people who weren’t teachers but did have a bachelors degree and put them into classrooms.

Other than that, I didn’t know a thing.

One of my tests of whether a book is well-written or not is whether someone who has no knowledge on the background of a subject can still sit down and enjoy the book.  Relentless Pursuit passed with flying colors.

Donna Foote takes the reader through the first year of teaching as a Teach for America student, giving the perspective and insights from a handful of teachers.  She also showed the point of view of several of the administrators of the schools, along with the founder of the Teach for America company, Wendy Kopp.  Because it was able to cover the situation from such a wide variety of angles, by the end, I felt like I had a great grasp on how the company works, as opposed to if I had simply read an autobiography of one of the teachers in the program.

Unfortunately, it’s greatest strength (variety of viewpoints) was also its greatest weakness: I tended to get confused about who each person was.  If I was going to read this book again, I’d do it with a scratch piece of paper and take notes about each person and their personalities.  That way, I could keep up with the book better.  But I tend to be one of those people who gets names mixed up very easily, so this may be a Hava-only problem.

Since I live in boring Idaho, where everything is relatively safe and steady, I think the most eye-opening part of the book was the description of the school and area that the teachers were teaching in: Locke High School, in Los Angeles, California.  The idea behind Teach for America is to take educated adults (with bachelor degrees), give them a summer of training on how to be a teacher, and then put them into the worst schools in America, in an attempt to improve that school.

The teachers sign a contract saying they’ll teach for two years, and then they are actually encouraged to leave and get into business, etc, as normal.  Teach for America has figured out that if educated businessmen and women were out in the corporate field with an in-depth and personal insight on our failing schools, then they would be a better position to help those failing schools get better.

So Teach for America has a two-pronged approach: Send the teachers in to help the schools in the short-term, and then send those teachers out into the business world to help educate everyone else as to what needs to be done.

Rather ingenious, I have to say.

So when the teachers get sent to the “worst schools in America,” we’re talking some really scary places.  Locke High School is in the middle of the Crips and Blood gang territory, along with quite a few other gangs, meaning that just trying to walk to school can be extremely dangerous.  As Foote pointed out in one section, the kids are not stuffing their backpacks full of books to take to school, but rather clothing, so they can change clothes as they walk through different gang areas.  That keeps them from getting killed for wearing the wrong color of t-shirt.

If only that was an exaggeration…

As you can imagine, if you’re worried every day about whether you’re going to live or die, and trying to survive gang wars, actually learning anything in class would be at the bottom of your to-do list.  Staying alive is a lot more pressing.  So here you have a group of teachers who are idealistic, and wanting to teach the students so they can get out of Los Angeles and actually make something of themselves, but how do the teachers reach the students who have better things (like living) on their minds?

It definitely made for an incredibly interesting book.

It didn’t end with a happily-ever-after conclusion - some of the teachers quit part way through the year, incredibly disillusioned and simply ready to go home.  Some of them quit at the end of the year and went to other similar organizations like Green Dot, to see if they could make a difference there instead.  Locke High School got embroiled in a political battle, and the whole school basically ground to a halt for the next year as people were fighting over who was going to control the school.

No, it did not end happily ever after, but I think that’s the reality of dealing with real life, instead of Hollywood.  Life is messy, and Teach for America is not immune from that.

If you’re interested in the program, you must read this book.  If you want to have an inside look at one of the most troubled schools in America, Locke High School, then you don’t want to miss this book.  If you’re interested in school reform, or the state of education today, this book would be an excellent way to gain some basics on the ground.  And if you’re interested, even a little, in being a teacher, this book (despite its depressing nature) will make you say, “I can do this, and I need to do this!”  It manages to be inspiring even as it is depressing you.

Overall, I have to give Relentless Pursuit 4.5 out of 5 stars.  It made me want to be a teacher myself, although I think I would pass on Locke High School.

Hava

I had to read His Favorite Wife: Trapped in Polygamy by Susan Ray Schmidt after I found out that it was written a sister wife of the author of Shattered Dreams (in other words, they were both married to the same man, Verlan LeBaron.)  Irene Spencer had had a lot to say about Susan in her book (mainly, that she was Verlan’s favorite wife, and why was she always being treated so special?) and I wanted to see it from Susan’s perspective.

I’m glad I did - it was definitely one of the better written polygamy books.  I enjoyed it a lot more than Irene’s book, simply because Susan didn’t spend half of the book complaining about how she wasn’t “getting any,” like Irene did.  Susan was definitely unhappy with Verlan most of the time, but she didn’t wallow in it, and I was grateful for that.

I also felt like this book was a lot more exciting and gave a better understanding of that time period when it came to polygamy, because Susan talks quite a bit about her brother-in-law, Ervil LeBaron, a famous polygamist that had his own brother killed, along with some of his wives, children, and other people he thought deserved to die.   Irene said in her book that she specifically didn’t talk about Ervil because she didn’t want him to overwhelm her story, but because of that, I felt as if a large chunk of important information was left out.  Susan’s story was much more complete.

But not only was it more complete, but Susan’s writing style was better.  When she was a child, the writing was more simplistic, and the reasoning she did was more simplistic too.  As she grows up, the book becomes more in-depth, and you can see her change and mature before your eyes.  I felt that really added to the book.

If you’re interested in a follow-up after finishing His Favorite Wife, you’ll want to check out this website, where Susan does a question and answer session with readers.  Make sure to read the comments too - she and her daughter write out responses there also.  It was very interesting to see that Susan and Irene are good friends even to this day - I would think that would be very difficult, but I guess they’ve had years to get past all of the baggage that would have come with this lifestyle.

Tangent: While researching on the internet, I found out that Susan is living in the same city I am, here in Idaho.  What an incredibly small world this is!!  I wonder if she has ever come down to the library and I’ve met her and simply didn’t know it…I’ll have to keep my eyes open for her.

Well, out of the four polygamy books that I’ve read (Shattered Dreams, Stolen Innocence, Escape, and now His Favorite Wife) the tally is two Christians, one (maybe) Mormon (still not sure about that one), and one atheist.  As I’ve read these books, I’ve wondered what the majority of ex-FLDS believers become - if they do tend to go towards Christianity or another religion (or none at all).  I’m sure that no formal study has ever been done, so I guess I’ll just have to keep wondering…

Anyway, if you’re interested in polygamy in the 1960’s and 70’s, then you’ll definitely want to pick His Favorite Wife up.  It gives an eye-opening insight to what it is truly like to be a polygamist wife (and there is pretty much nothing good about it).  If you’re wanting an up-to-date picture of polygamy and what’s happening now, you’ll want to check out Stolen Innocence instead.

I give His Favorite Wife 4.25 out of 5 stars.  I’ll be keeping my eyes open for Susan around town!

Havs

Note: Joel Glenn Brenner is a woman, and there should be a umlaut above the “e” in her first name, although I don’t have a clue of how to produce one of those on my keyboard. Just so you weren’t too confused by me referring to a “Joel” as a girl…

I was checking a patron out at the front desk when I saw The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner in the stack. Intrigued, I put the book on hold as soon as the patron walked out the door.

When the patron returned it, I eagerly started reading and boy am I glad that I did.  I will never look at the candy aisle at the store the same.  Before reading this book, I was rather clueless about the chocolate world, and in fact, if asked, I would have said that Hershey and Mars had merged together and were the same company now.  (Don’t ask me why I thought that, but that’s what I believed.)

Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.  There is an intense rivalry between Hershey and Mars, akin to the one between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and actually, Hershey and Mars don’t play well together.  At all.  But that isn’t always how it was: In the beginning, Hershey helped Mars get started, and provided all of the chocolate for Mars for years.

Then to get even more bizarre, I found out what M&M stands for.  If you ask a Mars worker, they’ll tell you, “The owner liked his name Mars so much, he used it twice!” ie, it’s Mars & Mars.  Although it’s a good line, it’s not true, and in fact the second M stands for Murrie, the last name of the president of Hershey.

I told you it was bizarre.

This book was fascinating for me - I love to learn, I love chocolate, and Ms. Brenner is very adept at weaving in interesting tidbits and making it read more like a novel than a dry economics book on how these two companies came to be where they are.  She is a former newspaper reporter for the Washington Post, and it shows - she has a great writing style.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits:

• The secrecy is so strict at Mars that when their machinery breaks down and they have to hire an outside company to come fix it, they meet the mechanic at the door, blindfold him, walk him through the plant to the machine, take off the blindfold, let him do his job, then blindfold him again to walk him back out. All very politely, of course.
• Because Mars is a privately held company, they are not required to reveal anything about anyone to anybody they don’t want to.  If you call Mars and ask for the name of the president of the company, the secretary will say very politely, “We don’t give out that information” and click! hang up the phone on you.
• The men who started each company (Hershey and Mars) struggled an incredible amount before becoming successful.  Both of them lost their shirts multiple times before finally making it.  The author goes through the story of each man quite in-depth, and I felt like I was reading the biography of each man, along with the general story of the companies themselves.
• After the death of founder Milton Hershey, the Hershey company was mismanaged so badly that they started to sink, and quickly.   A small example of the problem: they kept track of what they were selling by counting the cases - they sold X amount of 6 packs, Y amount of 12 packs.  A 6 pack of what, they didn’t know.  They didn’t differentiate between a Hershey bar and a Kit Kat bar.  They simply knew that all together, they had sold X amount of 6 packs.  Which is an insane way of doing business.  This has changed since then.
• Mars sells very little peanut butter candy because the owners hate peanut butter. I don’t blame them (I hate peanut butter too!) but I do think that it’s a strange reason to make a financial decision.  Then again, not having to explain their decisions to anyone isone of the biggest reasons they have stayed a privately owned company.
• The Hershey company is the sole supporter of one of the largest and richest orphanages in the world.  Philanthropy was one of the guiding principles of Mr. Hershey’s life, although his dream of a Utopia didn’t play out like he wanted it to.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to ruin the book by saying too much.  I will say this: If someone had sat down and tried to come up with two completely different stories of how a chocolate company came into being, they couldn’t have done better than the two stories you hear here.  Mars and Hershey are diametrically opposite in every way except for the fact that both companies make chocolate.  It really was a great story.

I also enjoyed the fact that Brenner focuses on more than just Hershey and Mars - she also interviews and talks about other candy companies in the US and around the world.  It gives you a great perspective on the candy world.

The only part that I didn’t like is that I felt that Brenner tended to go on and on about uninteresting things at certain points of the book, stuff that a good editor would have chopped out.  It was definitely longer than it needed to be, and I found myself skimming a few times.

Overall, I think it’s worth 4.25 out of 5 stars.  If you’re interested in economics or are a chocolate lover, you’ve got to check this book out.  I promise you, trying to pick out a candy bar at the grocery store will become a whole different experience after having read it.

Hava

Escape by Carolyn Jessop was a very difficult and depressing book for me.  I picked it up because of course, polygamy has been all over the news lately - even Oprah did a show on polygamy where she invited polygamists to come onto her show and share their side of the story.  There’s also been a plethora of polygamy books released - Shattered Dreams (which I already did a review of), His Favorite Wife, and a brand-new one called Stolen Innocence.

I’ve only read the two books, so I can only compare between them, but I have to say: Carolyn Jessop’s Escape had a very different take on polygamy than Shattered Dreams, although I supposed that’s to be expected.   The author of Shattered Dreams (Irene Spencer) is quite a bit older than Carolyn and her story took place before Warren Jeffs came in and took over, so her version of the sect was much more tame and normal than what happened to Carolyn.  And then of course you’ve also got two very different personalities.  All polygamists don’t think the same, just like all Catholics don’t have the same temperaments.   Some people may feel like if they’ve read one book on a subject, they’ve read them all, but in this case, that’s definitely not true.

I enjoyed reading Escape more - it starts out with a bang, on the night that Carolyn flees with her children and goes to Utah.  It’s fast paced and your heart starts racing just from reading.  Will she get out in time?  Is she going to get caught?  You can feel the tension rolling off Carolyn in waves.  Unlike Shattered that suffered from a real lack of editorial insight, Escape has great pacing and a good timeline to it.

My only real qualm with Escape was along the same lines as the problem I had with Not Without My Daughter - Carolyn has a real bitterness to her attitude and writing.  I didn’t expect her to be all smiles and sunshine about it, but even when something good or funny was happening, I still got this feeling that there is pure anger in her towards the polygamy cult and the experience itself.  I walked away with the gut feeling that Carolyn is going to be healing from this experience for a very long time, as opposed to Irene who I felt healed and forgave faster and easier.

And perhaps I’m way off, who knows, but that was the vibe I got from the books.

Overall, it was a supremely depressing but needed look at the polygamist life.  The Great Escape for Carolyn happened in 2003, so it isn’t as if this is an outdated book and things like this simply aren’t happening anymore.  Instead, she gives a fairly current snapshop into the lives of polygamists - I don’t think I’ll ever see a news story on polygamy quite the same again.

I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Hava

Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge was an autobiography that I really wanted to love.  The story is nothing short of a miracle: Andrew was a child raised by a mentally unstable mother (Hope) who locked him in a closet and fed him cat food, yet showered him with love.  She truly loved him, even though she couldn’t take of him physically.  The state eventually took him out of her care, and he ended up in the foster care system in California.

He spent a month in the MacLaren Hall, the Los Angeles County’s facility for foster children, and then was placed with a family who he ended up spending the rest of his childhood with.  On emancipation at age 18, he was still with that same family, which is unheard of as a regular foster child, but the family never made any move to adopt him, and he never wanted them to.  The family never treated him as one of their own, and the mother handled him very roughly at some points, although as he got older, that seemed to stop (or he at least stopped talking about it).

He eventually ends up going to college, graduates from Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer - not a “normal” route for a foster care child, where roughly only 3% of foster care children even go to college.

As a survival mechanism, Andrew Bridge was a very withdrawn, shy child who didn’t interact with others very much, and never developed a loving bond with any of his classmates, his foster family, or really anyone at all.  His mother was in a mental institution for years, and he had virtually no contact with her for the 11 years that he was in foster care.  His grandmother tried to contact him, but because of extreme poverty, wasn’t able to very often.

Although that barrier between him and the rest of the world was one of the reasons that he survived and did as well as he did (because he never depended on others to do anything for him - he had to be independent) it also made the book into a difficult read, at least for me.  I never felt as if I truly related to him and what was going on with him - I felt as if there was a wall between me and him, and I never felt personally connected to the story.  I almost didn’t finish the book; it was a struggle to get it done.

The other problem for me was the style of writing.  I have never really liked poetry, and his style of writing would rightly be described as “poetic.”  Here’s a very brief excerpt as an example:

“As always, she had made the twin bed that morning, and now in the evening shadow, the tucked bedcover rested smooth as ink.  I flopped down, my legs hanging at the side, my ears and nose still cold from the trek across the street.  Tired, my mind emptied slowly into the raven night of the room’s deepening corners.” Page 28, “Hope’s Boy”

If that appealed to you, then you’ll love this book, because the entire book is filled with phrases like that.  To me, it was just a bit over the top.  That’s a personal preference, and I hesitate to even mention it, except it was something that bothered me throughout the book.

Overall, it was just too depressing (there never is a feel good moment in the whole book) and I never felt as if I truly got to know him, so despite my want to love it, I ended up simply liking it okay.  I’m surprised it was a New York Times Bestseller - I wouldn’t have pegged it to do that well, myself.  Did I completely miss the boat here?  Anyone else read it and want to tell me what they thought?  Leave your comments below - I want to hear from you!

3.75 out of 5 stars

Havs

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer was an eye-opening book.  I had already read Escape by Carolyn Jessop, so I had something to compare this book to, and I thought it was interesting how different the two husbands in the story are.  Carolyn’s husband never attempted to be fair and love all of his wives equally, nor did he ever attempt to be a good husband to Carolyn.  Irene Spencer’s husband, Verlan, was very different, and in his own way, he truly loved Irene.  He wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was Irene.

In a nutshell, Irene was raised in a polygamist family, but her mother left her father when she was young, and eventually when Irene fell in love with a man who wasn’t Mormon or a fundamentalist, her mother encouraged her wholeheartedly to marry this guy instead of marrying a polygamist.  Scared to marry outside of the church and be damned for all eternity, Irene married her half-sister’s husband instead, and became Verlan’s second wife.   She regretted that choice for the rest of her life, as she suffered through abject poverty and third-world living conditions, on top of being subjected to being pregnant 13 times in 25 years.

The book could have been helped by editing - she spends a lot of time talking about how she never got enough sex with her husband, and how she had to share her husband and she was jealous because of it…When I say a lot, I mean the majority of the second half of the book was spent talking about this.  After a while, I started skimming, because there was just so much of that, that I could take, before I wanted to say, “Good, great, let’s get on with it then.  I understand you’re jealous - now what?”  She also seemed to spend most of the book crying her eyes out, which I am the world’s most sympathetic person (I cry when I watch a sad commercial on TV!) but even I wanted to say, “Aren’t you sick of sobbing yet?  Just do something about it already.”  She kept saying she would divorce him if he did blah-blah, and then he’d do it, and she’d stay with him.  Then she’d set a new criteria - she’d divorce him if he did this and this, and then he’d do it, and then she’d stay with him.  It was frustrating because for all of her ranting and raving and yelling and crying, she never followed through on any of her promises and always allowed him to come back into her life.

In the epilogue, I found out she became a born-again Christian.  That part seemed strange to me - Carolyn Jessop of Escape basically became an atheist of sorts, which is probably the same decision I would make if I had lived through what these ladies had lived through.  I would have figured God punished me enough - if he wanted any part of me, he would have made for a nicer beginning to my life. I also thought it was strange that Irene didn’t seem to try to separate out the current LDS Church from the fundamentalist sect she had belonged to.  For the most part, whatever the fundamentalists believed, she seemed to believe that’s what the current LDS Church believed in too.  I don’t know if that’s because of the conversion to born-again Christianity or not, but that left me baffled.

Now that I’ve read both Escape and Shattered Dreams, I’m going to read His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt because strangely enough, Irene and Susan were both married to the same man, Verlan - they were “sister wives,” to use the term in the polygamy world for it.  It’ll be very interesting to read about that relationship from Susan’s eyes, since Irene definitely had a lot to say about it. Escape and Shattered Dreams were so different from each other, I can’t wait to see how His Favorite Wife plays out.

I give Shattered Dreams 3.75 stars out of 5 - with better editing, it could have easily been a 4.5 or higher, but it was simply suffering from an overtelling of every single event that happened in 25+ years.  I would say that with what’s happening down in Texas right now, it’s worth the read, although I’d borrow it from the library instead of buying.

Havs