By Carol Lynch Williams, 2009.
“My sins.
A plan. Books. And a boy.”
I picked this one up because it looked like it would read well on the plane and looked a bit creepy. More adults should read the odd YA novel: they’re not too long and many have compelling stories with broad age appeal. They are often suitable for ELL readers as well.
The reviewers on the back cover were right: it was a compulsive read. Thirteen year old Kyra has grown up in a fundamentalist Mormon community with 3 mothers and over 20 young siblings (the setting sounds like one of the twin cities that straddle the border of Utah and Arizona). She loves to play piano and secretly reads books she gets from the county’s mobile library and hides in a tree near the trailer that is her home. But there are endless babies and Kyra takes care of her mother’s children in their squalid trailer in the dessert, steals from her other mothers to feed her own ill and pregnant one so she has time to read. She seems to have carved out some happiness for herself, but that little hope is crushed by The Prophet’s vision of Kyra marrying her 66 year old uncle. She is forced to decide which fears are to be faced and how she is to live.
I liked how Williams doesn’t artificially go into the multitude of horrors that exist in these closed fundamentalist society, keeping with what Kyra would know and think in her situation. The novel has a lot of intense fear to it: armed Apostles in black SUVs make an appearance and parents can’t really protect their children even when they want to.
After devouring this book, I was motivated to read more in the form of Daphne Bramham’s The Secret Lives of Saints: child brides and lost boys in a polygamous Mormon sect (2008), which has been making me realize how much research Williams must have done and then stepped back to approach it from within -difficult stuff for an enraging situation!
Shelley Hrdlitschka‘s Sister Wife (2008) is another YA title about Mormon fundamentalists.
A note on the book/library worker as savior:
As a librarian who has read a lot of YA lit in which the librarian figure is somewhat glorified, I found the bookmobile plot line to be at least worthy of a second thought. You can practically see the Light of Knowledge emanating from the van. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of reading or what personal revelations it can bring about but I am definitely suspicious that books paint an overly rosy picture of the impact of libraries and books. They are, after all, written by people who have been welcomed into the world of print. Not everyone is. What if the bookmobile driver in this story had demanded government issued ID and proof of address?
