I found Wives and Sisters a compelling read. I am not sure whether I was judging it as a crime novel or as a revelation about what can happen in Mormon Culture. As someone who, a few years ago, was asked to leave the Mormon premises in Utah and was actually escorted to the gate after being invited to ask questions, I am inclined to think it was the latter. I guess I was intrigued to learn more.
This is a frightening book in many ways but particularly in the honesty with which Natalie Collins, who was brought up in Utah and was raised as a member of the Mormon Church, who attended the University of Utah and who is still living there with her husband and daughters, manages to distance herself enough to regard herself as an 'Ain't in a land of Saints'.
The heroine in the book, Alison Jensen, was raised according to the "strict tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑Day Saints". At the age of six she found herself questioning these especially when she and her friend Cindy, an eight year old, were attacked in their child's paradise by a man threatening them with a rifle. Terrified, they tried to run away but Alison fell over a tree root and knocked herself unconscious. When she came round, Cindy and the man had disappeared; Cindy was never seen again and Alison was told to forget her. Eventually silence is drawn over the incident. This is a patriarchal society where men hold all the authority and women are regarded as their instruments, to be treated as men dictate.
Alison endures life as she grows up refusing to be baptized when she is eight years old, living through her mother's death as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, having to accept her father's remarriage and his continued physical violence against her, until at eighteen she goes to Salt Lake City to the University of Utah. She tells her father that she has written to Church Headquarters to have her name removed from Church records.
Through all this, Alison is haunted by Cindy's disappearance and by not knowing what happened to her. After graduation she sets out to solve what happened to her playmate and who was responsible - and also to discover who later raped and is still stalking her. Like Angela's Ashes, this book is sometimes almost too painful to read.
Natalie has written a second book, Behind Closed Doors, to be published in January 2007, and I look forward to reading it.
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Rosemary Brown