Three stars for writing, five stars for topic and content...this one will break your heart... ( )

I will start by saying that I have a lot of feelings surrounding polygamy. A lot. You can't come out of reading D&C 132 (the whole text, not just the one fluffy feel good verse that gets read in Sunday School) without a lot of complicated feels. And then you dig more into the messy history and the accounts of people who actually lived it. And then there's everything with how the practice continues in fundamentalist groups. And it goes on, just a big mess with no simple or straightforward answers.

Carol Lynn (beautiful writer, faithful Mormon, not anti at all, but nor will she shy away from telling her truth) wades through all that mess to highlight an angle that hasn't been talked about a whole lot: how polygamy haunts modern Mormons and modern Mormonism. She takes the fears and pain that have been locked away and placed on "the shelf" and brings them out into the open. Most of the book deals with her own personal journey with the doctrine of polygamy, including stories from her family history. But she also includes excerpts of the thousands of stories people sent her about how this doctrine has affected them. Men unable to cancel a sealing to an unfaithful ex-wife. Widows who cannot be sealed to their new husbands without cancelling their sealing to their first husbands. Children who are sealed to a man they've never met rather than to their biological father. Women and men haunted by the fear that polygamy will be required in the eternities. Really the only perspective she leaves out is that of single members, which was a serious omission and is my only criticism of the book. I have a single friend with three standing serious not joking offers to join existing marriages if polygamy is brought back; and that's just a whole other messy angle.

Pearson does not attempt to give an orthodox justification of polygamy. Rather, her conclusion is that the Mormon church cannot come to a model of equal partnership until it sheds the burden of polygamy. For real, not just "we don't do that anymore, except sort of kind of" but decanonizing 132 and clearly repudiating the teachings of the past. That conclusion isn't going to sit well with some members, but despite that this is not an antagonistic book. Pearson is a person who, more than anyone I've seen before, holds great love for the LDS church while holding it accountable for its faults. She sincerely wants this church to be the best it can be, and she sees that potential even when it is hidden under mountains of pain. She never fails to imbue her words with this sense of almost paradoxical hope. The tone of the book follows the way she describes her feelings about Joseph: "for I still love Brother Joseph. I love him after the pattern of Emma Hale. I love him with a heart he broke a long time ago."

This book is love and heartbreak and pain and hope and potential all rolled into one. It is a book I think every Mormon needs to read, whether to understand why people are so torn up by something we supposedly abandoned so long ago, or to come to peace with the practice themselves.

And because I can't pass up an opportunity to link my favorite of her poems, here is "Pioneers." ( )