Product Description

In the closed world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, Carolyn Jessop was forced to obey her controlling husband's every demand. She had no money, no power and existed as one of six wives battling for her husband's attention. For seventeen years Carolyn suffered for the sake of her children. She tried to protect them as the cult's new leader, Warren Jeffs, started marrying girls off younger and younger. But when Carolyn discovered that her twelve-year-old daughter had spent three days at Jeffs' home, she knew she had to do everything in her power to take her children and flee. At 35 Carolyn escaped. This is her harrowing - and ultimately triumphant - story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9240 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
Born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the author describes her life before, during and after her marriage at 18 to a 50-year-old man with three other wives. This painful memoir certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to the polygamous fantasies of the HBO series Big Love. The author's large family lived in grinding poverty, and Jessop was constantly subjected to humiliations at the hands of her husband, Merril. But she had inner resources. In a decidedly patriarchal culture, she often spoke her mind, and she talked Merril into letting her go to college. Her occasional questioning of his views, however, earned his suspicion and the condescension and mistrust of her fellow wives. So what kept Jessop in the community? Fear. From her earliest childhood, when she played a game called "apocalypse," she had been taught that God punished those who disobeyed his rules. Furthermore, she knew that no woman had ever managed to get herself and her children safely away from the community. Still, one night in 2003, Jessop snuck her eight children out of the house and fled to Salt Lake City. There, she found little in the way of support networks for women escaping polygamy. She was told that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." The chapters about her struggles to adjust to this new life are more riveting than the occasionally tedious descriptions of her earlier hardships. Especially wrenching are scenes featuring the two of Jessop's children who felt torn between their parents and resented their mother for taking them away from the FLDS church. The book's final pages recount triumphs large and small, from getting her first stylish haircut to standing up to her husband in court.Though Jessop's circumstances were unusual - and particularly harrowing - her memoir will appeal to many women who have left abusive relationships. (Kirkus Reviews)

Elle
Riveting, compulsive reading

Synopsis
In the closed world of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, Carolyn Jessop was forced to obey her controlling husband's every demand. She had no money, no power and existed as one of six wives battling for her husband's attention. For seventeen years Carolyn suffered for the sake of her children. She tried to protect them as the cult's new leader, Warren Jeffs, started marrying girls off younger and younger. But when Carolyn discovered that her twelve-year-old daughter had spent three days at Jeffs' home, she knew she had to do everything in her power to take her children and flee. At 35 Carolyn escaped. This is her harrowing - and ultimately triumphant - story.

Customer Reviews

What more can be said about this book?
Everyone here has pretty much raved about this book, so I won't rehash it all. Just adding my voice to the rest and saying - Wow! Received this book in the morning, finished it by evening. Truly one I couldn't put down - realized I was walking around the house with it in my hand. You start out feeling sorry for this woman, but soon realize she is quite capable of taking care of herself and her children and doesn't want or need your pity, thank you very much! Early in the book you know that she is going to rise above this life, and you want to keep reading just to see how she does it. Inspirational.

Stranger (and more disturbing) than fiction
My wife bought this book. Just the sort of thing she would read, I thought. Then I picked it up myself, and was unable to put it down. The events and the personalities it describes are all true, yet barely credible. One wonders how such things can go on in a 'civilized' western country. Carolyn Jessop's upbringing in the FLDS faith, her forced polygamous marriage, the harrowing accounts of her treatment by her husband and his favourite wife, and her eventual escape are calculated to make your blood boil. At every page I was asking myself: How could this happen? How could anyone allow themselves to be treated in this way? How could anyone be duped into believing such utter garbage? Why did no-one do anything about it? Strange but true. You can read newspaper accounts about the FLDS and its prophet Warren Jeffs that will bear it out. This may be a book of the 'hasn't my life been awful' genre, but it is one of the better ones. Not a literary masterpiece; it just tells the story as it happened. The book and the events it describes are very recent. I would imagine that its author is still in the process of recovering from her old life and discovering her new one. If she were to write an update from a longer perspective in a few years from now, I would certainly wish to read it.

Nightmare
This is a truly frightening book, which shows the appalling lengths people subvert so-called religion for their own ends, but also an extremely gripping one. You see how brainwashing can lead people into believing the most terrible tosh. Thankfully Carolyn managed to escape, but there are hundreds more left behind without hope of a decent life (and part of the problem is that they don't really know what a decent life is). Perhaps even more amazing and disgraceful is the apparent collusion of the USA authorities in allowing such practices to continue.