The lonely polygamist, by Brady Udall

Once you accept the main premise of the book, that it is about a family with difficulties, just like most other families, but it consists of four wives, twenty-eight children, and one husband, you get pulled into this engaging and long novel. Golden Richards has problems. Brought up by a lonely and abandoned mother, he has had little contact with the outside world until his wandering father, suddenly financially successful, summons him to the polygamist society he has fallen into. Golden makes an impression on the elders as a rising figure in the sect and is expected to take a series of wives. A couple decades later, he has three houses, four bickering wives, 28 kids, suffers from the grief of losing a special needs daughter due to his own negligence, and the collapsing economy makes finding work as a contractor difficult. What work he does find, and conceals the true nature of from the extended family, consists of building an addition to a legal brothel across the state line in Nevada. There he falls in love with the immigrant wife of the owner and sets in motion the main plot of the story. At times hilarious, at times very moving, it is a big, sprawling book, much like the family, that I enjoyed a great deal. 549 pp.