Review: Hidden Wives by Claire Avery

Hidden Wives by Claire Avery is the story of half-sisters Sara and Rachel, who are members of the Blood of the Lamb polygamous community. At 15, both are of an age to be married: Sara has been promised to her uncle (as his fifth wife), while the prophet is still praying about the fate of beautiful Rachel.

One of the joys of reading is immersing yourself in a book to the point where you forget you’re reading. Hidden Wives started off promisingly, hooking me with the following sentences:

“For as long as Sara could remember, she jolted awake every morning, startled to be alive. Whenever her father looked at her, she imagined him calculating the width of her neck and the degree of pressure he would have to exert in order to snap it.” (p. 11)

Unfortunately, almost immediately, Avery’s writing style tripped me up, so I felt I couldn’t get past the words into Sara and Rachel’s world. Over and over, the odd imagery took me out of the story (“It was a big, toothy grin that split his cheeks in two like a cracked egg” [pp. 11-12]; “Her arms would drip over the ends of her chair like wet diapers . . .” [p. 114]; “His teeth were a gallery of grays and yellows . . . splayed outward like badly hung paintings” [pp. 130-131]). I read the first third of the book with a notebook nearby, jotting down all the strange turns of phrases and incorrectly used words. The middle of the book picked up, and I found myself more drawn into the story, wanting to know what would happen to the sisters; however, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the book’s message—that polygamy hurts women and children, and that something should be done about it—trumped the storytelling. The clearest example of this is the subplot involving Sara’s best friend, Ruth, who appears at one point in the novel so Sara (and the reader) can learn something about the dangers of close-kin marriages; once the point has been made, Ruth promptly disappears as a character in the book. I also unfortunately anticipated many of the plot twists (several were foreshadowed only moments before they happened), and the ending struck me as wishful thinking rather than a likely outcome to this story.

There is no question that it’s shocking that the type of human rights abuses detailed in this book are tolerated in the name of religious freedom in North America today. However, if you want to learn more about polygamy, I would recommend that you read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer, The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff (read my review) or The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams instead.

I am very much in the minority in not liking this book; every single one of the reviews mentioned below is positive!

Thank you to Forge Books for sending me this book to review.
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Hidden Wives was on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Rundpinne • Luxury Reading • Novel Whore • Simply Stacie • Trisha’s Book Blog • Thoughts from an Evil Overlord • Bibliofreak • Book Club Classics • Crazy for Books • S. Krishna’s Books • It’s All about Books • All about {n} • Life in the Thumb • Scraps of Life • Stiletto Storytime • Joyfully Retired

Other reviews:

Amy’s Book Obsession • Life Is Short. Read Fast. • Lu’s Raves and Rants • Queen of Happy Endings • Reading on a Rainy Day

Interview with the authors, Michelle Poche and Mari Hilburn (who write under the pen name Claire Avery): Life Is Short. Read Fast.
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