The Polygamist's Daughter

January 23, 2017
In this somewhat fractured memoir, LeBaron, daughter of Ervil LeBaron (the infamous, murderous leader of an offshoot group of Mormon polygamists), recounts her early life and eventual escape in the 1980s from the cultish culture of her birth. Born to one of Ervil wives, she rarely saw her father, as the family frequently and suddenly moved to avoid federal agents. After spending a year in Mexico with clan members away from her mother, she returned to Houston. The death of her father galvanized her resolve to flee the controlling, abusive group, which she managed with the help of a half-sister. The last third of the memoir recounts her life post-polygamy, including being born again and eventually raising her own children. She includes striking vignettes about her deprivation, such as subsisting on mayonnaise and refried bean sandwiches or working long hours scraping dead roaches from used appliances, and alarming anecdotes about how the family survived, including using smaller children to rummage through locked clothing donation dumpsters. Unfortunately, the book lacks a clear overarching structure and tends towards disconnected memories without much detail on the beliefs and practices of the group. Agent: Jessica Kirkland, Blythe Daniel Agency.

April 1, 2017

Similar to recent memoirs (Elissa Walls's Stolen Innocence or Carolyn Jessop's Escape) about life within and ultimately leaving a cult, LeBaron's account tells of being one of 50 children of rogue polygamist Ervil LeBaron. Her story is one of maternal disaffection, geographic dislocation, and an appalling paucity of education and meaningful relationships until she breaks away at age 13 to live with one of her nonpolygamist sisters. While her personal courage is laudatory, this work lacks historical context, raising such questions as how her father and mother came to embrace this radical Mormon belief system, and whether her father was an originator of the cult's blood atonement justification for the murder of wayward members. Also missing is enough personal introspection to transform the retelling from life vignettes into a sustained narrative, rendering this a superficial sharing of events and feelings from her childhood perspective. VERDICT Only for exhaustive readers and collectors of faith memoirs.--SC

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