"Escape" by Carolyn Jessop
desert_vixen, you have got to read this one. I gave it four stars instead of five for the very eighth-grade writing style. This is the harrowing autobiography of a woman who grew up in the Colorado City, AZ FLDS cult that Warren Jeffs later had moved down to Texas. Carolyn was a rare and gifted exception to the FLDS rule in that while she was married to a man 32 years her senior as a fourth wife, she was allowed to go to college to become a schoolteacher. This enabled her to have enough knowledge of the world to round up her eight children and flee into the night. Most of this is the story of her life as a plural wife, which was filled with emotional and mental abuse. (Her husband, who is now head of the Yearning for Zion cult, took a holier than thou attitude about never having hit her.) Both depressing and fascinating, this is a window into a world that is incredible to think actually exists.