Mary Logue

Bridget Reardon, an Irish immigrant to America in the 1880s, has left her previous home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, seeking a place to live that is more civilized and less violent. When she arrives in Salt Lake City, she feels she has found it. While she has no interest in becoming a Mormon, she likes the calm and sophistication of the place, and when she’s offered a job at a bookshop, her ideal profession, she’s delighted. The owner, Mr. Cutter, invites her to move into a room at his large, show more elegant home, where he lives with his five wives. Bridget is quite sure she would never want to be in a polygamous marriage herself, but she finds the company of the five women and their children congenial and is curious about their religious beliefs. On the whole, the wives get along well, save for one problem: Mr. Cutter wants to make Amelia, his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, his sixth wife. Neither Amelia nor her mother like that idea, and his chief wife thinks five is enough. When someone decides to do something about it, Bridget has a murder on her hands. What was Mr. Cutter doing in the sewing room where he normally never ventured, and how did he die?

With the local coroner as an ally, Bridget sorts through the suspects. Since no one from outside the household visited at the time of his death, it must be one of them, and several of the wives have motives. There is also young Amelia, who was adamantly opposed to marrying her stepfather, and his son by another wife, Brandon, who wants to attend art school in the East and would like to take Amelia with him as his wife. While she sorts out the possibilities, Bridget learns about the place where she has landed. She reads the Book of Mormon, which she finds unpersuasive, but comes to respect the religious beliefs of the wives and their solidarity, even as the federal government moves to outlaw and penalize polygamous marriages, staging a raid on the city. While all this is going on, she finds the murder weapon and puts the puzzle pieces together.

The third in the series, after The Streel (2020) and Big Sugar (2023), continues the story of a young woman (just eighteen in this entry) as she moves westward, seeking a place to call home. She isn’t sure she will ever fit into a community where Mormonism is so dominant – she is the proverbial wasp in the beehive of the Latter Day Saints – and wonders if she should return to wild Cheyenne, where her beloved brother and the man who wants to marry her have settled for good.

Logue is a prolific author of books, including the Claire Watkins mystery series. This compact story, only 200 pages long, is told in a voice that is as no-nonsense as its protagonist, who combines curiosity with common sense and personal courage. The entire series, which could appeal to young readers as well as adults, does a good job of balancing historical context with a mystery to solve. For armchair travelers who favor time machines, this historical series is a lot of fun. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this historical mystery, the second in the Bridgid Reardon series after THE STREEL Inspired by the lives of the author's immigrant ancestors, this engaging story features a very young but highly independent young Irishwoman who has traveled with a male friend to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the "big sugars" are the wealthy cattlemen who call the shots - and covet the land being parceled out to newly-arrived settlers like Brigid.

As the story opens, Brigid finds a show more terrible sight - her neighbor, a woman, has been hanged from a cottonwood tree. Who is responsible, and why was the woman targeted? Brigid aims to find out, even as she looks for her missing brother and tries to reconcile herself to life in a "soddy" with a man who she might eventually marry. The ending leaves room for another adventure in another part of the West.

Though it's the second in the series, it's not necessary to read the first - though you might want to, given the inevitable spoilers in this story. It's a short, engaging, and well-researched, though the author never bogs the story down with too much material. Recommended for mystery lovers, including young adult ones. show less

This was a beautiful book. The story was a simple one--a girl (a princess?) doesn't want to go to bed because she doesn't feel tired, and her parents trick her into falling asleep by getting her all ready for bed--but the illustrations make it vibrant and almost life-like. The girl's parents tell her all of the other animals that sleep, and accompanying these few words are pictures of animals in their natural habitats doing what comes naturally to them. As the girl is falling asleep, she show more imagines each of these animals and we see illustrations of her and the animals intertwining. It is really beautiful to see the different ways that the illustrator can combine the image of the girl with the image of the animals, and it is almost as if they fit perfectly together.

This would also be a good way to look at comparison because as the girl does each step toward falling asleep, like curling up under the covers, being in a nest of blankets, etc., she is compared to how a specific animal falls asleep. show less

In my line of work as a school librarian, I usually don't bother with books about sleep. Those are to be enjoyed by parents & their tired charges at day's end. Nonetheless, I borrowed Mary Logue's "Sleep Like a Tiger" from the public library upon hearing lots of good press.

This story is framed like many a go-to-sleep tale, with its 6-year-old protagonist determinedly not tired & her parents good-naturedly not convinced. (Unlike a popular porcine protagonist, this child is not bratty and her show more parents are not slavish.) In familiar fashion, the insistently awake girl stalls her bedtime with questions:"'Do whales sleep?'...'Tiny snails?'" The narration and the illustration seem to thicken and the colors mute as the story progresses, mimicking slow-arriving sleepiness, (""Then she snuggled deep as a bear, a deep-sleeping bear...") to the inevitable somnolent ending.

While I found it bittersweet that the parents, child asleep at last, are depicted on the final endpapers as apart with the child between them when they ought to be engaged in witty adult conversation, I was consoled by the intermittent appearance of Blake's "Tyger" in the lush, dense mixed-media illustrations. Maybe it needs to be in the school library anyway. show less