Strange Children

Name: Strange Children
Brand: HighBridge Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Sadie Hoagland
ISBN: 9781696602655

Author: Sadie Hoagland

Narrator: Amy Melissa Bentley

Unabridged: 10 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Highbridge Audio

Published: 07/20/2021

Categories: Fiction, Coming Of Age

Synopsis

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father's child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these "strange children" shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

About Sadie Hoagland

Sadie Hoagland has a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah and an MA in creative writing/fiction from UC Davis. She is the author of American Grief in Four Stages, a short story collection published by West Virginia University Press. Her work has also appeared in the Alice Blue Review, the Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist Journal, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, the Fabulist, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Quarterly West and currently teaches fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kaylee

Interesting read with great parts. Lots of characters, comes with several family tree maps. Not exactly sure of the plot/ending.......more

Goodreads review by Michelle

Thanks to Red Hen Press for a free advance copy of this title (expected pub date May 18, 2021). I'm writing this review voluntarily. "Strange Children" is an unsettling and evocative novel narrated by a group of children who grow up in a polygamist commune in the Utah desert. An oppressive figure ca......more

Goodreads review by Sharon

3.5 stars In twelve year old Emma’s community, the word of the Prophet is law, so when she falls in love with the fourteen year old son of her future husband, the young couple inadvertently sets off a chain of events that will end in a radical change in their polygamist commune’s way of life, and mor......more

Goodreads review by Eileen

I began this book as an audiobook, which was a mistake. The print version has the family tree which is oh-so-needed. The story is told in the voices of many people, and while the narrator was good, there's just too many characters to keep track of on audio. The story is pretty amazing. It's a hard r......more

Goodreads review by Jaye

Most 'cult' novels, as in novels involving cults (this one is a polygamous Christian fundamentalist community with a tyrannical leader), rely on their cult-ness for the story, but this book stands out for its writing, the poetry in the language, the meditative explorations of the point of view chara......more