This was an interesting read and after reading the author's notes, I liked it even better. Author took her time introducing the lives of the three women and she did a great job fleshing out each of the women's lives. Author didn't glamorize polygamy nor did she villainize it.
This book made me look up the Utah war between Pres. Buchanan and Brigham Young and the slaughter by the Mormons of innocent Americans in the Utah territory. ( )

This book is an exploration of polygamy – i.e., plural marriage – how it forms and how it operates. It’s an exploration of a topic that is controversial because of its place in early Mormon society and curious because it runs contrary to how much of society has organized itself. I live in the American South and am a Protestant Christian. Southern Christians would never deign to practice public plural marriages. (Polyamory is another matter, practiced but only only in secret!)

In this book of historical fiction on the nineteenth-century American frontier, three women have their stories converge by circumstance. Through very different experiences, they all marry one man and encounter all of the nuanced jealousies one would imagine in that relationship. Yet somehow – and Hawker wants to explore this in detail – they decide to work together in a form of a sisterhood. In the author’s note at the end, Hawker explains that the profiles for these characters were drawn from her relatives, and the desire for peaceful sisterhood is true. And the “true” story actually contains five wives, not three.

I liked this book because it talked about something that I didn’t know much about. Again, polyamory, not polygamy, is the name of the game in the evangelical American South. But I really didn’t like the ending. It seemed to whitewash everything into a fairy-tale ending – “…and they lived happily ever after.” I would have liked some deeper drama there instead of an idealization of being sister-wives. I understand that diverse opinions will always exist about this topic, especially among those whose families have participated in such an arrangement. Nonetheless, the ending just was not compelling enough for me.

Those interested in the history of the American frontier will find this story interesting, especially about the pilgrimage from the American midwest to Utah. Further, those interested in religious history, including frontier religion, Mormonism, and the broad cultural piety that enveloped early America, will find much to digest here. Save for the practice of polygamy, most of the nuances of the Mormon religion are not explored here, and a light sprinkling of Christian piety abounds in its place. Finally, the story has a tinge of feminism to it. It celebrates strong women who make choices for their lives and for their families’ lives, even amidst a patriarchal society and a fool-headed US president.

Polygamy does not necessarily lead to weak women. That’s the main theme I take from this book. I wish it didn’t whitewash the difficulties in the denouement of the book. Rather, I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson that part of personal strength consists of being able to live with contradictions. These women show how they found strength in the midst of contradictory times and uncertain (and discomforting) experiences. Perhaps the next generation will write a book about similar themes in our times. ( )