Strange Children
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.
Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.
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Hoagland's lyrical but convoluted debut novel (after the collection American Grief in Four Stages) follows the children of Redfield, a polygamist cult living in a remote Southwest commune. After 16-year-old Jeremiah and 12-year-old Emma are caught having sex, Jeremy's father, Josiah, drives him toward the nearest town, Pine Mesa, and abandons him on the side of the highway, then takes Emma as a wife. Redfield's "Prophet" tells the group Jeremiah died in the desert for his sin with Emma, but when Emma's brother, Levi, returns from Pine Mesa with news Jeremiah is alive, the children and adults alike begin to question the Prophet's leadership. Between chapters are interstitial passages narrated by the "ghost of the dead girl," who is determined to protect Emma ("Across our worlds, like speaking through wool, I tried to tell her what done to me"), and the story ramps up when federal agents appear to investigate probable child sex abuse. At times, the cast feels unwieldy, with too many characters' points of view shoehorned in, but Hoagland's talent lies in her ability to show how they've been brainwashed in a system designed to control them and where obedience is peddled as transcendence. In the end, once the narrative threads finally tighten, Hoagland's story satisfies.
