A rant about TEARS (4th attempt!)
This is the first FLDS book I've read so far that's told in 3rd person, from the POV of 17-year-old Emma but occasionally checking in with mom (Connie), dad (Gene), 12-year-old brother Keith, and other characters this originally "regular Mormon" family meets as they convert to living "the Principle" and Gene takes a plural wife.
One ordinary Sunday before church, Dad calls the family together and makes the big announcement. He does all the talking, but Emma speaks right up and asks Mom if she's "100% for this." Connie's mouth says yes, but her voice, her expression, her body language, everything else screams otherwise! She's just going along with it because she'd rather share her husband than lose him completely, and in the event of a divorce he would probably win custody of the kids.
Emma soon meets some FLDS girls her age, most of whom had been born into this culture of plural marriage (and some who can't wait to get out). At her first dance, she sees her dad step onto the dance floor with a pretty girl who doesn't look much older than Emma. She isn't--she's about 20--but "Mary, is that blonde lady my father's wife?" (WHAT?!! Why should this virtual stranger know more about her own family than she does?!) Yes, this Colleen person is going to be Gene's second wife, and poor Connie has the heartrending duty of giving her to Gene as if she were that R-rated lamp that was Ralphie's dad's "Major Award" in A CHRISTMAS STORY. About that...Connie would be carrying out the Law of Sarah--Remember the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, how Sarah gave her maid to Abraham to be a "babymama" for the infertile couple? Llewellyn seems to think the maid's name was Leah, not Hagar.
He also seems to think that horror writer King spells "Stephen" with a "v"; that a BUNCH of girls can "change into A new outfit"; and that "sloppy Joe's" need that extra apostrophe along with the chili powder and diced onions. Everyone reading this does understand that the "altar" is the place where 2 people "alter" their lives, for better or for worse, right? Not our auteur! Also: there's way more telling than showing; passive voice is used too much; and too many sentences are mis-punctuated. The front-cover art is spot-on, and in a way the back cover does let you know what you'll be getting from the book. Call the last sentence in the summary "dramatic effect," but the mis-punctuation lets it down. Emma has a lot of questions that she asks in total incredulity that would allow them to be punctuated with exclamation points instead, but something that starts "Have you ever heard of...." really should end with a question mark, and sometimes it doesn't. Even questions that appeared in narrative musings would have looked better punctuated by question marks.
I am glad I read this; I just wish I'd been in on the editing. It wasn't just the punctuation hit-or-miss. Take, "Keeps em' coming back"--does that look right? "Brainwashing" is 1 word on 1 page and 2 on the next; someone "complements the girl's cooking"--and there are 2 errors in that phrase; and sometimes when Keith speaks, Llewellyn tries WAY too hard to capture the early-teen-speak tone. There are some interesting turns-of-phrase, but they're all but lost in the distracting carelessness. So much that one appears in a slightly different form in Llewellyn's MURDER OF A PROPHET, which I learned of from this book.
Still, at least it wasn't GOD'S BROTHEL (Andrea Moore-Emmett), in which one of the courageous women profiled was "rewarded" with a disrespectful typo in her name: "Lillian BOWLES."
Then again, are all these errors just further proof that only God is truly infallible, as the story tells and shows how fallible the FLDS people were and how faulty their world seemed?
