I’m usually a very naughty book clubber. I buy the book, read 20 pages, put it down and never look back. Not this time! Last week I visited the school library at work and was kindly bullied into giving their April selection a try.

Boy, am I glad!

I’m about 100 pages into David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife and really enjoying it. It’s a little clichéd at times, but I’m still very engaged and curious to see how it all turns out. A synopsis from the book jacket:

It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.

Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.

It’s available in paperback and worth a read!