Abby's review
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife
by Irene Spencer
Abby's review
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife by Irene Spencer
Abby's review
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I really enjoyed this memoir. Knowing very little about the fundamentalist Mormon church, I found Spencer's candor and honesty about being a polygamist's wife refreshing, heartbreaking, and informative. Spencer never stoops to the level of pathos or moralizing. She tells her story straight-up and to the point, detailing how she falls in love with her brother-in-law and becomes his second wife, the abject poverty she lived in for much of her life, bearing 13 children, and more often than not, caring for 20+ children.
The end, which details her eventual conversion to Christianity, got a little too "God-heavy" for my personal tastes, but I respect her description of learning to love a more benevolent God as represented by the Christian faith, rather than the punishing and angry God as represented by the fundamentalist Mormon faith.
All that being said, though, what I liked most about the book is that for all the crap that Spencer lived through, she never once "ba...more
The end, which details her eventual conversion to Christianity, got a little too "God-heavy" for my personal tastes, but I respect her description of learning to love a more benevolent God as represented by the Christian faith, rather than the punishing and angry God as represented by the fundamentalist Mormon faith.
All that being said, though, what I liked most about the book is that for all the crap that Spencer lived through, she never once "ba...more
