Stolen Innocence - Elissa Wall

This book is about a woman who grew up in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) (aka the crazy mormons).

I read this book because although I have met some very nice people who follow the Mormon faith, I have not met anyone from this group and really didn't know anything about it.

After reading this book - wow.

It's not so much about religion, but about the manipulation that the people in charge were able do to to the rest of the people. At 14 this girl was married off to her first cousin. She knew nothing, absolutly nothing about sex and was supposed to just go along with what ever her husband told her to do. Before that, her family had been tossed about and mixed around so much.

The stuff that this girl had to go through was just crazy, being removed from her father's home at the will of the "prophet" going to school, being pulled out of school, going to public school, being pulled out of public school, having her mother "married" to another man, being married to her cousin, being raped by her cousin, having 4 miscarriages then being kicked out of her community all before she was 18 years old.

Crazy

I did a bit of math and realized that she is about 6 years younger than me. This is not a story that happened years ago, this was somehing that pretty much just happened. It's a whole other world, but it is happening here in the U.S.