Escape by Carolyn Jessop

I rarely read a book cover to cover in a single day. I did with Escape by Carolyn Jessop, picked up at a charity thrift store yesterday and devoured last night. I am not the only one. Here is a review a fellow blogger posted last year.

The book is a gripping read, to say the least. Ms. Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, an offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was familiar with part of the story, how she raced to get all eight (yes, eight) kids, including a severely handicapped toddler, in a van and race to safety and a new life after many years of abuse. This mad dash, complete with running out of gas within sight of the appointed meeting place with her brother, is breathlessly recounted in the preface and returned to toward the book's end. In between Ms. Jessop recounts growing up with an allegedly mentally ill and physically abusive mother, forced marriage as a teen-ager to a much older man, and life as sister wife and mother of eight. The politics in a polygamous family is fascinating. Even mundane acts such as using a washing machine can be overlaid with tension and oneup(wo)manship.

Ms. Jessup had me at "Let's play apocalypse!" on page 24."It was magic," she writes, "our version of hide-and-seek." The game was enacting FLDS notions of the Last Days, which would usher in a millennium of peace on earth. But before the peace, utter destruction. Some children in the game played the faithful, while others took the role of evil government agent or bomber pilot. Still others were "resurrected Indians" who defended the faithful but tossing tomahawks at bomber pilots' heads. Ms. Jessup was six years old when she played this game. (Quick background note: Native Americans, called Lamanites in Mormon parlance, play a key role in the LDS myth of origin. They are the fallen people or "bad guys" in much of the Book of Mormon. FLDS leaders adapted this mythology to include End Time "resurrected Indians" who were brought back to life and given the chance to make amends by helping the FLDS in their final conflict.)

The book goes on to talk about Ms. Jessop's experience as a younger wife in a cloistered polygamist family. A central theme in her narrative is that as bad and bizarre as life was in her childhood and early married life, they got worse and stranger as Warren Jeffs ascended to leadership. Jeffs is currently serving two 5-year prison sentences for two counts of being an accomplice to rape for convincing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin. One interesting side story is the relationship between Carolyn and her daughter Betty, who resisted leaving the sect and returned to it as soon as she was legally able to do so.

Ms. Jessop wrote a followup book last year, Triumph: Life After the Cult. I will be looking for it, if only to find out what Betty and the "resurrected Indians" are up to.

The FLDS drama continues, as evidenced by this article from today's USA Today about the imprisoned "prophet" retaking or reasserting control over the sect.

"Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen was actually available for the taking at my local library today. So I took it. Tomorrow I am taking it back.
It is OK and I enjoyed the 20 minutes or so I spent in its early pages. It is one of those "what is all the fuss about" books that I wanted to at least sample so I could be prepared for water cooler chat about. Franzen is a clever writer. And knows it.
The setting and characters are just too ordinary to maintain my interest. No vampires. No wizards. No entrance to fantastically "other" worlds via rabbit hole, wardrobe, or ring. No murder that must be solved. No eboli variant threatening thousands with a messy death unless one valiant epidemiologist swoops in to save the day, armed with only a haz mat suit, a microscope, and half a dozen tongue depressors. No interesting  historical background such as in Oliver Potzsch's The Hangman's Daughter, which I am currently reading on my Kindle. That one is set in 17th Century northern Europe.
"Ordinary," no matter how cleverly described, can only hold me for 20 minutes or so.