Here, the Saints establish a new city by the Great Salt Lake. After Joseph Smith’s death at the hands of a mob in Carthage, Illinois, Brigham Young and the rest of his Saints move west, leaving their community in Nauvoo for the desert of Utah (NB: I originally wrote ’empty desert’, having thought that the region was entirely unpopulated, but LuAnn has very kindly pointed out in the comments that there were Ute and Navaho Native American groups living in the area).
So I found the historical part of Ebershoff’s novel particularly interesting, as Ann Eliza recounts the story of her parents and other members of the earliest community of Mormons, united around the charismatic figures of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In fact, I’m most familiar with the Church of Latter Day Saints through their sterling work in compiling genealogical resources, which are invaluable for family history research. If an earnest missionary rings your doorbell here, they’ll most likely be a Jehovah’s Witness. Mormons and Mormonism are familiar in America in a way that they aren’t in the UK. To make matters even more interesting, events since the book’s publication have focused international attention on the community that must surely have inspired Ebershoff’s fictional Mesadale. Her son Jordan, expelled from the community as a teenager, comes to believe that BeckyLyn is innocent but how can he prove it? The stories of these two women intertwine in an absorbing tale of plural marriage, faith and family. BeckyLyn’s husband has been shot dead in his basement den and she, his nineteenth wife, has been arrested for murder. In the present day, we meet BeckyLyn Scott, a member of a breakaway fundamentalist sect which preserves the practice of polygamy. Her lectures and writings, represented here by a fictional autobiography, helped to expose the reality of plural marriage and, ultimately, to abolish it in mainstream Mormon faith. One is Ann Eliza Young, the apostate former (nineteenth) wife of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young. It’s Ebershoff’s third novel and focuses on the practice of polygamy in the Mormon church by interweaving the stories of two women, separated by more than a century. I first read this book several years ago, before I started this blog, and although I remember enjoying it immensely, I couldn’t remember the details.
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