Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife: Irene Spencer

When it comes to your salvation, where do you draw the line between your happiness and the beliefs ingrained over a lifetime? For Irene Spencer, living a polygamous lifestyle was a doctrine from God and one that she couldn't ignore. Through twenty-eight years, nine other wives, and over fifty children (fourteen of which she gave birth to) Irene struggled to make this belief work even when she saw her own soul sliding deeper into darkness. This book is her way of telling a story that too many people won't hear.

Irene was born a fourth-generation polygamist and grew up watching her mother struggle with her father's other two wives to feed and clothe the numerous children. Irene's mother finally leaves her father in an attempt to make it on her own and Irene meets a man that she falls deeply in love with but he won't live the Principle (the polygamist life) and so she feels God doesn't want her to be with him. She instead chose to marry Verlan LeBaron, a man who was already married to her half-sister Charlotte. It was decision that would cost her twenty-eight years of happiness and stability and would drag her over her Central and South America in an effort to evade the authorities.

The story is told with a richness of detail and the disjointed narrative that can only come from true memory. The poverty of the family situation at times seems almost comical in it's depths until the reader reminds themselves that this isn't fiction. At times she can be somewhat overly descriptive in places when describing things of a somewhat indelicate nature but it only serves to reinforce the awfulness of the situations that her husband dragged his family through in his quest to achieve "Celestial Glory". In the end though, she does find happiness, with a new husband, and a new path to the God that she thought had abandoned her. Sometimes that's all we really need.
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Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Center Street (August 22, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599957191
ISBN-13: 978-1599957197
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