Book Review - The Sister Wife

The Sister Wife by Diane Noble
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Right off the top I'm going to confess something: I did not finish reading this book. Life is too short for boring books that also make you really angry. Reading the "whole thing" would not have changed my opinions on what happened early on in this book. It would only have prolonged my agony.

The Sister Wife is a tale of early Mormonism. I'm kind of fascinated by the history of the Moromons as well as their current lifestyles with plural marriage. It started with watching Big Love, progressed into memoirs of former Mormons who have left the church, and is now a guilty pleasure (Sister Wives) of reality tv and sensational novels. I thought this was going to be one of the latter.

It was not.

I have this pact I've made with myself. I require myself to put in at least 100 pages toward a book before I give up. I found myself dragging through the first 100 pages of this book. I just didn't care about the characters, I was bored by their experiences, I wasn't interested in their futures. I pressed on, because there have been times that once I gave a book a chance I wound up really enjoying it. Some books start slow. So I gave it 100 pages.

And when I got just past that part, I still was considering giving up on it, but then they put the one character I did like - Bronwyn, the nanny - in some peril. She's sort of a minor character but I had started to like her, so I kept reading. And it got kind of exciting. She had gone into pre-term labor below decks in a clipper ship during a horrible storm. And the baby was breach. I thought she might die. I thought they might not find a midwife aboard ship. I thought perhaps the baby was in danger. I read on.

And the midwife did all she could, and the situation was bleak. Then the leader of the mormons came in, and they prayed over her. And everyone could see the baby move into proper position and Bronwyn was better, because prayer fixes everything.

No. I threw the book across the room. It hit the wall - I'm not usually so mean to library books. But I was *livid*.

You want to know why? Because it's these kinds of books that encourage the tactless people who say things like "If you had prayed more, maybe your daughter would have lived." I lost my daughter. Praying wasn't going to fix her. It wasn't going to fix me. And people read garbage like this in fictional novels and then blame people for the loss of their children, because clearly if they'd been better, or prayed harder, or been higher in God's esteem, they and their child would have been fine.

No. It doesn't work that way.

I'm not saying I don't believe in the power of prayer, positive thoughts, or other influences in the universe, but I'm saying that this kind of writing pisses me off. It makes it look like some people have a hotline to Jesus, and if you're good enough he listens. If not, it's clearly your own fault.

Screw that, and screw this book. It did nothing but bore me, then tick me off more than I thought a book could.

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