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A Memoir
by Ruth Wariner
Book Reviewed by:A riveting, deeply-affecting true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist doomsday cult.
Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turned a blind eye to the polygamous practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible. After Ruth's father - the man who had been the founding prophet of the colony - is brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarries, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant.
In need of government assistance and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where her mother collects welfare and her stepfather works a variety of odd jobs. Ruth comes to love the time she spends in the States, realizing that perhaps the community into which she was born is not the right one for her. As Ruth begins to doubt her family's beliefs and question her mother's choices, she struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to find a better life for herself.
The Sound of Gravel shows us the personal side through the eyes of a young, brave girl. The author's understanding of her mother's motives and beliefs as well as her ability to separate the terribly wrong decisions from the love of her mother is riveting. This is a book I could not put down and stayed up half the night to finish. It really takes you on a dusty, dark journey into a world I never really knew existed..continued
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(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
The Sound of Gravel, a personal account of the author's traumatic childhood, is part of a surprisingly popular genre commonly called, somewhat derisively we might add, the misery memoir.
In a 2006 Guardian article, a publishing industry official pointed out that "readers of these books would previously have looked to fiction for their emotional engagement but now they respond to the extra 'integrity' of fact." Since then, publishers have struggled with nonfiction accounts that are not entirely so (James Frey's A Million Little Pieces comes readily to mind). Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone ran into similar troubles as well, with reporters faulting the accuracy of some of the claims made.
Over the last few years, the genre has seen ...
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April Christofferson, author of Trapped
Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven is a very good book. Ruth Wariner's The Sound of Gravel is a great book, one that will haunt and inspire you for the rest of your life. In her exquisite and powerful telling, Wariner takes us to the darkest recesses of extreme polygamist Mormonism - on a painfully real and personal level - and brings us back to the light.
