All Her Father's Guns

All Her Father's Guns by James Warner is a fairly brief novel told from the perspective of two different men, connected by a woman they both love:  the woman is Lyllyan, and the men are Cal, her father, and her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Reid.  Cal is a successful venture capitalist and a proud Libertarian with a military past.  He loves his guns probably about as much as he loves his daughter, or maybe a little more - it's difficult to say.  Reid is a British ex-pat trying (rather unsuccessfully) to find a job in academia.  He and Lyllyan don't have the most stable relationship, but as she is a formerly straight-edge post-punk college radio DJ, that is probably not altogether surprising.

In fact, unstable relationships are kind of all over the place in this book - Cal and his ex-wife Tabytha, a Republican congressional candidate with a penchant for prescription medication, are not exactly on the friendliest of terms, and things only get more rocky as Cal's story progresses.  Furthermore, to call Cal's relationship with his philosophical Romanian therapist, Viorela, "complicated" might be something of an understatement.  They make such an odd couple to me.

The central plot of All Her Father's Guns is basically this:  Cal has had it with paying so much in alimony to Tabytha, and goes well out of his way to do what he can to cause problems for her in her political campaign; he even has Reid helping him with some of the dirt-digging.  He wants to find enough to blackmail Tabytha, but he ends up getting much more than he bargained for, and the truths could potentially ruin both of them.  Things take an even more unexpected turn when Cal wrecks his car, sustaining injuries to his brain.  It is a pivotal moment, as none of their lives will be the same from then on.

Escape

Escape by Carolyn Jessop is the true account of one woman's life in the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), a radically conservative polygamist sect of the Mormon church - and the story of how she eventually escaped with her eight children. Carolyn relates what her life was like growing up in the FLDS, and through her experience we see how drastically the church changed once power shifted from prophet to prophet - and how it became unbearable under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. By this time, Carolyn had already been married and become a mother; when she was eighteen years old, she became the fourth wife of Merril Jessop - a man more than twice her own age.

We also learn about the dysfunctional family dynamic that she married into - while it is preached that all wives are to be treated equally, it is common for a man to have a favourite among them, and this causes a lot of tension in the household between all the "sister-wives," as well as among the children. Psychological and physical abuse is common within the sect, both against wives and sister-wives, as well as against children.