Brief Description: Golden Richards has four wives, 28 children and a struggling construction business. If his life isn’t already complicated enough, he is contemplating starting an affair. Trish, one of Golden’s newest wives and unable to conceive any children with him, begins to wonder if polygamy is the right choice for her and her daughter from a previous marriage. Rusty, one of the middle children in a family where almost everyone is a middle child, struggles to stand out in a family where it is easy to get lost. The voices of Golden, Trish and Rusty weave together throughout this book to provide a multi-faceted view of a polygamist lifestyle from the view of the husband, a wife and one of the children.

My Thoughts: This book has the magic combination of elements that I look for in a novel: a sense of humor (often leaning toward the dark side) mixed with tragedy and heartbreak and the ability to illuminate a type of lifestyle that is unfamiliar to me. Although the title of the book sounds like an oxymoron, Brady Udall effectively conveys how the life of a polygamist could be incredibly isolating and lonely. The loneliness that drives Golden to have an affair felt completely believable to me, and I found myself rooting for him! But Udall makes a genius decision to bring in the voices of Trish and Rusty to counterbalance Golden’s perspective. I felt for all of them and was so involved in their lives that, even though the book is 624 pages long, I wasn’t ready to leave at the end. Although many parts of the novel are very funny (particularly one scene with some lost gum), Udall gives his characters real pain and problems too, which keeps them grounded in the real world. This was a wondrous read, and I would highly recommend it. If you are concerned with how it portrays a polygamist lifestyle, I’d have to say that I thought Udall’s depiction felt realistic, complicated, and multi-layered (as I imagine it might be).