Review
Title: Plural Bride to Be
Author: Cheryl Vaught
Publisher: Andrew Benzie Books
Genre: Historical fiction
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 332
Binding: paperback
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 9781941713679
Price: $12.95 US
Reviewed by Rebekah Cuevas for the Association for Mormon Letters
Set in 1950s rural Utah during “Operation Seagull,” which resulted in the mass arrest of dozens of polygamy practitioners along the Utah/Arizona border, Plural Bride to Be by Cheryl Vaught traverses the factious world of post-polygamy Mormonism from the perspectives of two very different characters: twelve-year-old Karen Hardy and Jewish FBI agent Ben Wolfowitz.
Although Karen is by far the most compelling character, and whose welfare drives the momentum of the plot, it’s through Ben’s eyes that we witness a nation’s efforts to squash the practice of polygamy in a state peopled with the descendants of polygamous Mormon pioneers. Needless to say, Ben’s assignment to uproot the area’s lingering factions of polygamous splinter groups is not met with ready cooperation. Most people just want to forget that polygamy ever happened, much like they try to turn a puritanical blind eye to the existence of 25th Street and the Ko Ko Mo Club, the seedier parts of town where Ben and his ex-Mormon partner Jack go to sleuth and drink.
Inheritors of insurrection and a deep-seated persecution complex, many of the Mormons Ben must contend with harbor their ancestors’ disdain for “outside agitators” even while outwardly disavowing the practice of polygamy. And it’s among these mainstreamers that Karen Hardy’s family must blend if they want to continue benefiting from the advantages of being active and worthy members of the church that runs just about everything in their society.
The problem is that the Hardys remain loyal to the self-proclaimed prophet Hyrum LeGrande, who is hiding out in trailers on Hardy property along with two of his five wives. If their loyalties—and LeGrande—are found out, Karen’s family risks excommunication from the Mormon church and her father could go to jail. Secrecy is paramount, but Karen is sick of secrets and she hates LeGrande, who begins grooming her as his next plural bride even though he’s old enough to be her grandfather.
Her age, she learns, is not an impediment, but an advantage. She overhears him tell her father, “Any worthy man can control his wives if they marry before they’re set in their ways. I assure you, my greatest pleasure is molding a pure sweet girl who is still as supple as potter’s clay” (pg 10). Every scene with LeGrande gives the reader, as Karen puts it, the “heebie-jeebies.”
One of the strongest aspects of Vaught’s semi-autobiographical novel is the dialogue. While the subject itself is utterly fascinating, and concern for Karen keeps the reader turning pages, Vaught does lancing justice to the cadence and vernacular of Mormon orthodoxy and fundamentalism. And that includes more than the colloquial classics “heck” and “gosh.”
At every turn Karen is bombarded with dogma and rebuke phrased in such a way that readers familiar with the culture and dialect will either take it for granted or start hearing the voices of their past. “Outsiders” of the culture can read this book and trust that the things said to Karen are things that have been said to Mormon children through the earliest generations of the church and echo to the present day: lessons on women’s roles and responsibilities to male priesthood holders, lessons on race and the eternal implications of skin color, and of course, lessons on faith and surrendering one’s judgment to the word of God as interpreted by a prophet.
Vaught successfully makes the reader care about Karen not only because she’s a child in danger, but because she represents other victims of dogma and abuse whose stories must continue to be told. In the book, Karen’s “crime” is merely that she asks questions, questions born of curiosity in the “way things are” and how those same things might be in the outside world.
Karen is all of us, or at least the way we should be. And for that reason, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in a well-told insider’s view of “the way things were” — at least on one farm in post-polygamy, Cold War-era Utah.