BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

Today, I am delighted to host my very first blog tour!  I’m new at this blog-hosting thing and I’m not completely sure how these things work, so I’m just going to wing it and hope everything turns out okay.  Kind of like that time when I tried to fix my broken VHS player by wiggling a screwdriver around in the mouthpiece.  (I can’t remember if that worked or not. Probably, not.)

Anyways… I am both delighted and extremely lucky that the book for my first blog tour is the wonderful novel by David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife.  I enjoyed reading this novel so much that even BiblioGuy was impressed with how quickly I finished it, and it didn’t have anything to with the fact that I was on a deadline… Okay, maybe it did a little, but I still would have finished it faster than usual because, after the first fifty pages or so, The 19th Wife is positively engrossing.

I don’t do summaries all that well (like you haven’t noticed, right?) and I think just about everyone knows the general gist of the story’s plot.  However, since this is a blog tour, I’ll (ahem) make an attempt at professionalism and do a proper summary no matter how many of you skip over it. So…

The 19th Wife tells two parallel stories of polygamy.  The first story centers around Ann Eliza Young, a 19th century Mormon woman who was Brigham Young’s 19th Wife and, eventually, a crusader against polygamy.  The second story is set in present-day Utah where Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of a fundamentalist sect years before, tries to uncover the mystery of his father’s murder, a murder for which his devout Mormon mother is accused.  Jordan’s mother was also his father’s 19th wife.

If the coupling of a modern-day mystery with the retelling of the evolution of the Latter-Day Saints and polygamy isn’t creative enough, Ebershoff tells the story, particularly Ann Eliza Young’s story, through a mixture of journal entries, newspaper excerpts, academic memos, and letters.  Though all of it is fictionalized, some of it is based on actual documentation which, along with Ebershoff’s ventriloquist’s hand at writing, gives Ann Eliza’s story the weight of truth.  In fact, for those of us who may not be all that familiar with the history of LDS, it may be hard to tell fact from fiction.

Some have offered that as a complaint.  I think it’s a recommendation.  After all, isn’t it the point of historical fiction to blend fact with fiction so well that the reader doesn’t know which is which?  That’s what I look for in my historical fiction and that’s what I found in The 19th Wife.  I don’t know if Brigham Young actually did what he does in this book, or if Ann Eliza Young was really the way she was portrayed.  But, at the end of the day when I pick up a novel classified as fiction, none of that matters as long as it’s a good and plausible story.  The 19th Wife succeeds on both of those accounts.

Not only does The 19th Wife succeed, but it excels.  Too often, the characters in stories told from multiple points of view sound, in many ways, the same.  The young woman sounds like the old man, or the professor sounds like the blue collar worker.  That is not at all the case with The 19th Wife.  Ebershoff is clearly a true talent who’s able to embody every character to whom he gives a voice.  I was a believer from the beginning to the end.

Which brings me to one of the things The 19th Wife is all about: faith.  The 19th Wife is an even-handed examination of how faith has the power to imprison a believer or to set them free; to give one renewed purpose in life, or to set one on the path of abuse and lies.  Briefly, faith has the power to do many things, and not all of them are good.  The story that Ann Eliza tells is the story of how one comes to have faith and accept a particular set of beliefs and how one loses it.

Jordon’s story is of how one reconciles what they used to believe with what they now know not to be true.  I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I recognize and appreciate the humanity and compassion Ebershoff lent to all of his characters, even to the ones who did despicable things.

I know that I’ve said before that I have been honored to have read a book.  And, indeed, at the end of the day, I consider every story an honor to read simply because, if I’ve finished it at least, it’s brought a piece of joy and excitement and adventure and life into my life.  But, if I had not been asked to review this book for the blog tour it’s very unlikely that I would have read this novel.  A book about the history of LDS and even one particularly about faith is not one I would normally have picked up on my own.  And that would have been my loss, because however narrow my interests may be I am always open to a good story.  And that’s exactly what The 19th Wife is, a good story – a story which I am honored to have read.  Recommended.

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Random House / Aug. 2008
$26.00 / 528 pps.

In case you’d like to know more, here are the other stops on The 19th Wife tour (all great sites, I might add):

Monday, May 18:   Hey, Lady!  Whatcha Readin’?

Wednesday, May 20th:  A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook

Tuesday, May 21st:  Becky’s Book Reviews

Tuesday, May 26th:  Book Nut

Thursday, June 4th:  A Life in Books

Friday, June 5th:  Bookgirl’s Nightstand

Monday, June 8th:  Live and Let Di

Tuesday, June 9th:  Ramya’s Bookshelf

Wednesday, June 10th:  As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves

Thursday, June 11th:  A Novel Menagerie

Monday, June 15th:  The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness

Tuesday, June 16th:  The Book Faery Reviews

Wednesday, June 17th:  Shelf Life

Friday, June 19th:  In the Shadow of Mt. TBR

And here is Ebershoff telling you all about his novel himself:

Finally, I have one free copy of The 19th Wife to give to anyone who wants it.  Just let me know in the comments if you’d like to toss your name into the hat sometime before Midnight (EST) on Thursday, June 4, and I’ll reveal the winner on Friday.  Good luck, everyone! And, as always, happy reading.

UPDATE (June 8, 2009):  And the winner is …. *drumroll* … Kari!!!! Congrats Kari! I hope you like it!

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