Customer Reviews

Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy

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What could potentially be a seedy novel that pokes fun of a segment of society that is on the fringe turns into an almost heart warming story of growing up in an unusual family setting. She writes with a conversational style describing her very different family, growing up with many syblings, and several mothers.

What comes through this book that while polygamy may have an appeal for some, it really comes packed with many loaded issues. Multiple wives creates multiple issues. Logistically speaking it is difficult to support seven wives, and many children. While her father was a doctor, several of the wives worked out of the home to help support the family, and those that were not working out of the home worked constantly trying to keep up with laundry, cooking, and cleaning.

Her life was wrought with hiding their family secret, as it is still illegal to have so many wives. Only children of the first wife are legally recognized as being legitimate. Their lives were not easy, and growing up in the church left them often with marrying early to continue this cycle.

This book is definatly worth a read! Its definately not the simple tale you think it might be.

I thought this book was fantastic. In a very human way, it fills a huge gap in what I knew about Mormon History and present-namely, what happened to the tens of thousands of polygamous families when the church shifted from pro-polygamy to anti-polygamy, and who are the tens of thousands of modern-day polygamists and what is their relationship to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The mainstream church teaches that Joseph Smith wrote down a revelation regarding polygamy in 1843, but that he had started practicing it well before then, but never recorded who his "wives" were, nor when they were "married." Then Brigham Young and the Saints in Utah had a whole bunch of wives and were honest and upfront about it. The federal government had a massive clampdown on the lifestyle, and in 1890 the church issued a "manifesto" stating that the church no longer taught nor encouraged the continuance of the doctrine. The way the church teaches it, the people who were in polygamous marriages simply ceased to exist as soon as the manifesto was decreed.

We learn in the book that a few days before the manifesto was issued, the president of the Church, Wilford Woodruff, called Dorothy's grandfather into his office. He gave him a calling to move to Mexico and establish a colony there were Mormon Polygamists could legally live their religion. Her grandfather went, but between the lawlessness of the country and inhospitable climate, they could not survive and were forced to return to America. A few events transpired were his viewpoint collided with that of the mainstream church-in addition to having abandoned plural marriage, the Church had drifted away from the spirit of the United Order and Law of Consecration. You see how her grandfather changed from a leader in the mainstream church to a fringe member to an excommunicated Fundamentalist.

Dorothy does a fantastic job of showing you the world through the eyes of a child born into fundamentalist sects of Mormonism. It shows her religious heritage and how it connects to the religious heritage of mainstream Mormons. And it shows the life of a child who loved her mommy and daddy, but obviously wasn't cut out to carry on the religious tradition that she was inheriting. The reader can clearly see the follies of Mormon polygamy and the flaws in the various adherents. But the focus isn't on the follies and flaws. Rather, the focus is on the humanity of the children, women, and men who find themselves indoctrinated in a religion of outcasts.

Dorothy Allred Solomon's honest, telling account of growing up in a fundamentalist Mormon family is both intriguing and disturbing. She pieces together a detailed family history from genealogical records and firsthand journals, careful to include and identify sometimes alarming behavior and inconsistencies in all of them, and offers an insight into what it was like growing up in a polygamist family as one of 48 children born to a naturopathic physician and his seven wives. At the center of this sprawling clan is her father, Rulon Allred, a complicated man whose single-minded devotion to living the "Principle of Plural Marriage" binds the family together, tears them apart, and ultimately leads to his demise.

What is remarkable about Allred Solomon's writing is that although she includes her comments and opinions, she steers clear of turning her fringe-society family into a cast of caricatures or one-dimensional religious zealots. While she obviously disagrees with polygamy--a belief she began to form at a very early age--she does not condemn those who practice it out of hand. (But she does express disgust at the sight of much older men sizing up young girls as prospective wives.) However, she is careful to include the devastating affects polygamous marriages have on those who enter into or result from them. Her own mother (her father's fourth wife, and twin sister of his third) suffered numerous nervous breakdowns, which Allred Solomon seems to attribute to her despair over sharing her husband with six other women, her "sisterwives" who, along with the children, refer to their husband as "Daddy." And while her father urges all of his children to "remember who they are," Allred Solomon struggles to figure out who she is in the first place, as someone who does not even possess a birth certificate, since registering her birth would have exposed her father's bigamy.

Ultimately, the book is one woman's search to find her own identity, and in doing so, she offers us a window into a bizarre and often misunderstood community.

I recently discussed this book with a friend whose an avid reader and an active participant in a women's book club. She was afraid the younger women wouldn't care for the book because it lacks dialogue. Such a shame and yet I wonder if it's that glamor and glitz that so many autobiographers interject into today's books (such as James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces") that contemporary readers look for and are disappointed when it isn't provided.

I, on the other hand, found this a fascinating tale that really delved into the mindset of those involved, regardless of how they were involved, in polygamy. Dorothy Allred Solomon, the daughter of a polygamist, writes about her experiences and recollections of life on the compound that expands into a detailed historical account of the polygamist movement, the fight to disband and abolish polygamy, the covert movement in the polygamist following and the shame that the by-products of polygamy, which includes Dorothy, had to come to terms with as they began blending in with monogamist families to escape the persecution that ensued.

The author writes the majority from the viewpoint of when she was a child, so I felt there was a fair amount that may have been influenced by the age she was when these events occurred. As the author recounts events that occurred later in her life, I felt some important elements may have been left out as it became devoid of the detail, bereft with the emotion that pummelled the first portion of her life and the book.

Yet, it's still a moving book that while it's dry in dialogue, allows the reader to get a good sense of what the author's family and the author herself had to deal with whether it was raw emotions and confusion or the outward reproach of society.

This memoir is one book that is as intriguing as its cover and title would suggest: the image is that of a butterfly trapped in a jar. The image of the lovely butterfly is obscured by the obvious fact of its captivity and the merest suggestion of an unhappy end (for the butterfly).

So it is with this complex, well-written memoir. Dorothy Allred Solomon describes a her childhood--a warm and loving network of sister-wives and half-brothers and half-sisters webbed together by the patriarch of the clan, her father, naturopathic physician Rulon Allred. Her father is a loving man who supports seven wives and 48 children yet he is often absent from his children's lives, compelled to hide his polygamy even from others of his own denomination. It is a precarious life and history that Solomon describes in this book as she explores both the joy and the tolls that polygamy takes on her own life and extended family. The history of her own solidly polygamous forbears is fascinating and revealing as are her own epiphanies about her life choices and relationships.

This would be an excellent choice for a book group to explore along with Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven."

Sue-Ellen Jones

Fort Collins, Colorado

Dorothy Allred Solomon has created a work of extraordinary beauty and insight. Her description of the trials and tribulations, but also the joys, of being raised in a family that adheres to the early Mormon practice of plural marriage is one of the most powerful explorations of family and gender relations I have ever read.

This book has particular personal meaning for me because I grew up knowing many descendants and relatives of Rulon Allred, the author's father and the patriarch around whom her family and religious upbringing were based. Solomon achieves something that I think many readers will struggle to understand: she writes about her life in polygamy without trying to force a simplistic moral judgment onto her father and his legacy. Although she herself has abandoned polygamy and expresses many criticisms of its effects on those around her, especially its effects on women, she also holds many loving and happy memories and refuses to issue a blanket condemnation of her upbringing.

As an outsider looking in at friends and acquaintances who live in this same faith community, I have also (albeit to a much smaller extent) experienced Solomon's struggle between the desire to criticize Rulon Allred's form of polygamy for its often negative effects on those who live it and the desire to protect and defend its practitioners from the equally hurtful judgments and intolerance forced upon them by a hostile and even hateful outside world, a world that mocks and refuses to acknowledge any virtue in a lifestyle emphasizing the bonds of faith and family.

As she explores this tension between condemnation and affirmation of her past, her father, and her religion, Solomon offers readers a glimpse into an intensely personal world of doubt, pain, jealousy, and above all love. Her work allows us to judge that world, but demands that we understand it as well.

Predators, Prey, And Other Kinfolk: Growing Up In Polygamy is the startling and personal memoir of Dorothy Allred Solomon, who grew up in a fundamentalist compound that promoted polygamy. Ms. Solomon recounts the familial and social costs of her upbringing, including the inevitable poverty of being one of forty-eight children born to one father, the scattering of her family to hide from government raids, and even a murder when a rival fundamentalist group assassinated her father. Predators, Prey, And Other Kinfolk is a starkly revealing autobiographical "tell-all" expose of contemporary polygamy that also speaks of the author's dedicated striving to find God's path as a woman caught up in a patriarchal fringe society.

Dorothy Solomon has lived what most Americans would take to be an odd life, growing up 28th of 48 children in an "old-fashioned" polygamist Mormon family. While the family story involves incest, lies, and murder, she portrays her father (stallion of the herd) as a kind and capable, if overwhelmed, man of medicine. Solomon is a moderately good writer. But she has not found a way to give this complex story a simple plot; it therefore meanders a bit, and the black hats and the white hats tend to get mixed, as do narrative threads.

All in all, I found the story interesting, and I think most readers will, too. As a student of world religions, I also found it worth my while as fodder for larger questions Solomon leaves unexamined. One thing that interests me here is of course the relationship between religion and sex. Westerners tend to think of polygamy as odd, forgetting that throughout history, and in most cultures, it was normal for rich men, at least. Curious, that Joseph Smith should reintroduce polytheism and polygamy at the very same moment. As I showed in my book, Jesus and the Religions of Man, history has seen many sexual revolutions, from which society recovers more often than it gains; what is more odd is the staying power of our own long and fruitful experiment with monogamy, under the influence of the New Testament.

Another question that I find interesting here, is the relationship between faith and morality in general. Contrary to some reviewers below, I find her portrait of her father fairly realistic. "There are bad people in every religion," yes, but there are also bad ideas, which corrupt even kindly people, or cause them to do unintended harm. Like Gorbachev-era communism, modern Mormonism is the seldom-remarked story of predatory belief mellowed over time, taken up by men and women who took to heart the ideals abusive leaders mouthed, and mellowed or explained away the oppressive means by which they got there. (While followers of more kindly gurus water down the holiness of their leaders.) But the modern world seems too cowardly to honestly examine the differences between religions. We prefer to talk vaguely of "fundamentalists" and "liberals," as if all religions in their purest form taught the same thing! Solomon does not open this can of worms, either, or explain why she remains a Mormon. To a large extent, her life thus remains in part the story of an unexamined life. But I am grateful she was bold enough to share as much as she did.

A very thoughtful and thought provoking book, unusual in its ability to both show compassion for the people involved in this lifestyle, while still revealing the harrowing side of polygamy. The author understands the psychology and forces that drive her family members to behave the way they do, and she does a good job of conveying those things to the reader. However, the book covers such a broad scope of time, people, and places that it was, at times, difficult to follow. I was also bothered by a discrepancy I encountered that made me wonder how accurate the rest of the book was. The author tells of her father coming to get her at the age of 8, while she was in hiding with her mother and siblings, sneaking her out to take her to be baptized. She talks of her father baptizing her in the icy cold river. Later in the book, while discussing her older brother Issac, she talks about the special bond they shared and how<em> he</em> was the one to baptize her into the church. There may be a logical explanation for this discrepancy, or perhaps the author was baptized twice, but I wish it had been clarified. Stumbling across discrepancies makes one wonder about the rest of the book. Overall though, a very worthwhile read.

I was raised in SLC, with polygamy right under my nose, but never knew of the strife and agony these children suffered to live their religious beliefs. What a heart-wrenching account of a young woman, struggling to fight the lifestyle she was 'taught' and the life her heart yearned for. Her story is told with love and compassion, and is riveting to the last page.