Strange Children

(Paperback)

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Description

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 fathers child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles awaya 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.

Reviews

Sadie Hoaglands vast imaginative compassion gives her uncanny access to the minds and bodies of eight strange children, their histories of abuse and longing for transcendence. I fell in love eight times, bearing the childrens pain, witnessing their afflictions. Through their mesmerizing, gorgeously lyrical language, the reader shares the joyful mysteries of spiritual desire, the ecstasies of secret faith, and the terrifying thrill of subversive reinvention. Harrowing and tender, this fiercely intense, exquisitely composed novel transports us from an isolated polygamist community in the wild desert of southern Utah to the bewildering buzz and glitter of urban streets in Salt Lake City, from the raptures of adolescent love to the violent extremes of sexual obsession. If we are biased, if we cling to comfortable misconceptions about people who live beyond our experience, these magnificently beautiful children will pierce and transfigure us.Melanie Rae Thon, author ofSilence and Song

A spellbinding, symphonic marvel of a novel. It could not be stranger, darker, or more illuminating. I found it impossible to put down.Rikki Ducornet, author ofThe Deep ZooandThe Jade Cabinet

I admireStrange Childrenfor its mythic grandeur, its intoxicating cadences. This is a novel about a world unraveling, a desert place illuminated by the vulnerable young who belong to ita place of child brides and murder, predation and exile, solace and exultation. Sadie Hoaglands heart is spacious and her sentences are marvelously lush.Noy Holland, author ofBird

"A work of social justice, this beautiful, hard-to-read novel gives voice to the voiceless."Emily Dziuban,Booklist

Hoagland excels at crafting the inner lives of her characters. Just as with her short stories, this novel will churn up unexpected reactions and deliver an emotional story that will cause readers to more deeply examine this subject, not from the perspective of courtroom proceedings or reality TV, but from haunting and powerful voices inside the community."Emily Webber,Necessary Fiction

"An emotionally intense and deftly crafted novel by an author with a genuine flair for originality and a particularly effective narrative storytelling style, 'Strange Children' is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to community library Contemporary General Fiction collections. " Midwest Book Review

"Hoaglands writing style naturally adheres to all eight adolescents, writing in a simple, yet specific way that gives them plenty of space to let their own voices shine. Every chapter is told from a different narrators perspective allowing the structure to work well for the reader and give more of a personal connection to each child."Sarah Winky,Prism Reviews

"If the point of fiction is to transport us somewhere unknown, Hoagland delivers in spades, and in prose that is consistently evocative, compassionate, and surprising."Harvard Review Online

Author Bio

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 inthe 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.