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| His Favorite Wife: Trapped in Polygamy | 
 enlarge | Author: Susan Ray Schmidt
Publisher: Kassidy Lane Publishing LLC
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 10000
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 445
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 097797300X
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780977973002
ASIN: 097797300X
Publication Date: June 15, 2006
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Product Description
His Favorite Wife is the heart-stopping, inspirational narrative of a courageous fifteen year-old girl who becomes the sixth wife in a polygamous marriage. Cascading with well-developed characters, this true story will capture your soul and imagination as the author reveals how a group of kind-hearted, sincere people are led to embrace this controversial lifestyle in their pursuit of the highest degree of glory. Laced with surprising brush-strokes of humor, this heart-rending saga will take its readers on a journey that outsiders whisper of and shudder about. It answers the question that a polygamist's wife is asked countless times: How can you tolerate sharing your husband? In North America today there are over thirty thousand polygamists. Many of them lead secret lives in their attempt to hide from society and U.S. laws. Their women are taught that obedience, unquestioning acceptance of polygamy, and giving birth to huge families of children to follow in their parent's footsteps, will assure them a celestial crown. Few search out truth for themselves, but trustingly follow their prophet. Susan's book deals with this head-in-the-sand ignorance. She too, was one of these women.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
Couldn't Put It Down... May 14, 2007
56 out of 61 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book, very well written and engrossing. This woman's life is or has been so far removed from anything that I've ever known that it almost seems unbelievable - but after living in Utah for a few years I know that every detail is absolutely correct. I've always wondered how intelligent people could be fooled into living this lifestyle and this book makes it clear. The people in the book are complex, her busband is an awful man with no concept or seeming concern for his wives and children; he makes them live in proverty and fend for themselves - but as strange as it sounds he believes that he is a loving man with everyones best interest at heart. He is so totally deluded about his own superiority simply because he is male that he also misses out on real love and family kinship. He is a likeable man - flawed by his own upbringing. I was not expecting the criminal element of the book, the murders in God's name - this group, or parts of it turned out to be the Polygamist Mafia. Truly a wonderful book and so full of action and odd characters, I'd love to see it as a movie.
An Amazing Story...... Recommend for BOOK CLUBs January 2, 2007
33 out of 33 found this review helpful
I wanted to know more about polygamy and thought it would be an interesting subject to read about. I have never read such a detailed personal struggle as Susan's. I felt like I was in every situation she was in. This book has it all -conspiracy, murders, poverty, husband-wife relationships, strained yet fulfilling relationships with women/sister wives, and all the children! The pictures in the back were especially interesting. I chose this book for my Book Club. It was a hit b/cs there were so many issues to discuss.
Couldn't put it down... September 16, 2007
27 out of 30 found this review helpful
What a powerful, moving, educational and disturbing read! For much of this book, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading fiction. How could people really believe what they were doing and how they were living. It would have been a great work of fiction, but because it was a true story, I often found it very disturbing. So disturbing that the story incorporated my dreams many nights after I put it down and went to sleep.
I read the whole book in a week. It only took me that long because I just had to get some sleep and work all day instead of read. Susan Schmidt wrote a book that captured my interest. Were it not "true", it would have been the best book I've read in a long. What a nut "Ervil" turned out to be, but truthfully, all the brothers were "nuts" in my interpretation of that word. Thank God Susan was a smarter girl than she initially appeared, and as she matured, she accepted the truth that was tugging at her heart and soul.
I always knew those wives weren't all peachy happy. I read this book to find out the truth, and thankfully, I now know what I suspected is correct.
 Brain washed January 20, 2008
18 out of 24 found this review helpful
I have read Irene's "Shattered Dreams" and yes, it is the better book. That said all women should read these books.
This 'religion' is the bench mark for brain washing. 14 year old girls being told they must marry these old men so that they both can get into heaven.
The husband of both Irene and Susan had 10 wives and 56 children!! He was a house painter! Couldnt provide a good living for one wife much less 9 others.
These women and the children lived in poverty. No lights, no bathrooms, no furniture and their clothing was brought to them by the husband from thrift shop cast offs.
It is absolutely disgusting. In my opinion this "religion" is all about these disgusting men wanting a new young wife every 6 months! In other worlds, it is about these men wanting sex. Getting into Heaven and being a God is their
con
to have these young , very young, girls to submit to them and have sex!
An autobiographical doozy! March 31, 2008
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Let's get right to it: this highly recommended book is an autobiographical doozy. Billed as a true story of violent fanaticism, this is the tale of Susan Ray, who was raised by a loving family in Colonia LeBaron in Mexico and who in 1968 married Verlan LeBaron one week after her 15th birthday. He was some 30 years her senior. Susan was Verlan's 6th wife. More wives would soon follow.
Filled with teenage romanticism, Susan, true to her age at the beginning of this story, is in love with love. She is swept off her feet by the twinkling blue eyes of Verlan, one of the brothers at the pinnacle of the LeBaron fundamentalist Mormon sect. Polygamy is common--even expected--in this isolated world, and Susan looks forward to having her own home with Verlan and close friendships with his other wives. This is God's will for her.
Things go down hill fast when Verlan moves her to Baja California where his other families live. One of her sisterwives is frequently cheerful and friendly; the others range from haughty to jealous and disdainful to blindly, seethingly angry. Verlan is oblivious. He works in Utah as a painting contractor and is away for weeks and months at a time either working or on church business. His random 2- or 3-day visits to his families mean that no wife ever gets enough time with him. Abject poverty barely describes how the wives and their manymanymany children live. (At the time of his death in 1981 in an auto accident, Verlan had fathered 57!)
In the midst of all this, trouble is brewing in the LeBaron sect. Ervil LeBaron, Verlan's brother, decides that he is the voice of God and that anyone who disagrees with him and his followers on anything must pay with his or her life. Yes, murder. Yes, kidnapping. Yes, pure mad fanaticism. And, yes, some of the Ervilites are still wanted by the FBI.
This book is a trip through the looking glass, a journey into an absolutely alien theology, a work that would be astonishing as fiction. As autobiography it is dumbfounding. The writing is as clear as a bell, the pacing excellent; Susan's voice never strikes a false note. How this uneducated, isolated young woman with 4 small children came to realize that the life they were living was not God's will and how she managed to escape polygamy and divorce Verlan in 1974 is absolutely gripping.
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