Dreaming Out Loud

by Michelle Roth

What if you dreamed since your childhood of a man you've never met, believing you would marry him someday? What if he actually arrives, exactly as you imagined, but he is a polygamist?

Painfully shy Sarah is 40 years old and recovering from cancer that left her unable to bare children. After she accepts her dream man as a mere fantasy, Jacob appears in her small, gossip-filled Wisconsin town. When Sarah falls in love with Jacob, he informs her that he already has two wives and eight children. He asks Sarah to come to Utah and be his third wife, offering her the family she cannot create on her own.

Sarah has spent her life running her father’s business and helping raise her sister Megan’s children. She decides to follow her own heart for once and leaps head first into polygamy. The choice is filled with concessions and battles Sarah is not prepared to face.

Sarah’s greatest allies and biggest critics on her journey are her sister Megan, a single mother struggling to raise her children in poverty, and their 82-year-old surrogate mother, Lilly, who left the south in the 1950’s in search of a home where her interracial marriage would be permitted.

Told in first person, we follow each woman through their own little reality, witnessing the upheaval as they change the definitions of marriage and family. They show us that we all carry the same struggles, the same weights of womanhood and motherhood, merely in different names and forms.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 25, 2014

Reviews

[Aaronw564 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. The different perspectives on life and relationships were refreshing. Some very insightful thoughts and ideas on life and living it.

[Ness · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dreaming Out Loud" by Michelle Roth was an amazing book that was very well developed. The characters you can easily relate to and you love them more and more throughout the book. You watch the characters grow. And that is an important factor on making an amazing book.
In "Dreaming Out Loud" there are so many sides and parallels to the story that make you realize just how many sides there are to life and a plethora of ways to look at it, for it to be determined and interpreted by each individual person.
If you want to read a book that opens your mind to new and almost uncharted topics that show you that doing something that you want and feel is OK and that you have the right to stand up for yourself and be your own person. To live in the now. And labels are not what matters, and can sometimes make life harder. Not to judge someone before you get to know them.
"Dreaming Out Loud" is a book you want to read on a day you want to learn, be inspired, open your mind and see life in a way you never have.

[Tillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

while this book isn't my usual read, it was beautifully written, full of interesting characters. a little more emotional then I personally prefer.

[John Nondorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a good deal of wisdom in this book.
Some strong women's voices and heavy doses of reality.