However, what is supposed to drive this book along is the who-really-dunnit, but it gets lost in amongst all the stuff about polygamy, plural wives, and the effect of these sects on the children. The tender banter between himself and his lover and the teenage runaway Johnny is really well done and often very amusing. I particularly admired Ebershoff’s skill in depicting the way this character’s dialogue varied in different contexts: respectful but wary of his mother (whose persisting faith he found alienating) superficially polite towards her lawyer carefully antagonistic towards sect-members and pseudo-flirtatious with a female fellow-evictee from the sect bizarrely called ‘5’. He had jaundiced attitudes towards authority but an open attitude towards alternative lifestyles he was forgiving and generous. I never really felt that Ebershoff had captured the female voice very well, whereas Jordan’s seemed the authentic voice of a 21st century male. Of the two main narratives, I much preferred Jordan’s. The 19th century narratives are supplemented by newspaper reports and the narrative of Brigham Young (the ‘Prophet’) while the 21st century narrative is supplemented by that of a PhD student researching Ann Eliza Young’s life and by a fake Wikipedia entry. It’s a pastiche so it’s written from the POV of two women: Ann-Eliza Young in the 19th century and the other, BeckyLyn Scott, the mother of Jordan, a young gay who was evicted from her fundamentalist sect but has to re-enter its world because she’s been unjustly charged with murder. On the plus side it begins well, with an engaging theme: what it’s like to be one of numerous wives in a polygamous marriage which is justified by religious belief. The 19th Wife was a worldwide bestseller, and like all bestsellers it had its good and bad points.

The 19th wife by david ebershoff