Like blogging, I read in waves.

There are seasons of my life where I devour book after book unable to get enough. Then, there are other times where I can’t bring myself to crack open (or push my Kindle “On” button) a book. I have been in the latter season as of late. I was sluggishly trying to make my way through Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” (highly recommended with great reviews), and I just couldn’t get into it. So, I slacked off.

And then Brad and I planned a trip to head to Florida to celebrate his sweet cousin’s wedding, and I needed a good beach book because we were leaving our boy behind and I planned on devouring at least one book.

One of my favorite book sources recommended “The Lonely Polygamist”. And Oh My Gosh. I just freaking loved it.

You know when you read a book and the characters are so real, so well defined that you can not only picture them, you can feel what they are feeling… that is this book.

Golden Richards is lonely. Even with his 4 wives and 28 children, he is alone in the world for all intents and purposes. And this loneliness drives him to an affair. And chaos in his already wild life.

Golden is a large man with a sad history- an absentee dad and a depressed mom. The Church saved him in more than one way.

But Golden pales in comparison to my favorite character in the book- Rusty Richards.

Rusty is hilarious and heart wrenching. He is fun and devastating. He falls somewhere in the middle of the 28 kids, and he is the one black sheep in a very large flock. And he is in my top 10 (maybe even top 5) literary characters of all time. I seriously could not get enough of this kid in the book.

It is thoughts from Rusty, like this one, that make this book as amazing as it is:

So because of Aunt Beverly’s shoe policy, here he was pedaling down the street in his tube socks like a retard. Where was he going? He didn’t know. He had thought about going home and asking his mother to allow him to stay there, he would tell her all the terrible things Aunt Beverly and her a-hole kids were perpetrating on him, but he had already tried that twice now and it hadn’t worked. Today, he decided, he would pedal until he got so far out into the desert nobody could ever find him, except for maybe a bunch of illegal Mexican bandits who had got lost on their way to Las Vegas and formed their own civilization by constructing adobe forts and eating lizards and he would surprise them because of his silent-walking ability, and they would look at him suspiciously and say, Cómo estás? and because he had paid attention in Spanish class at school he would say, Bueno, gracias. Cómo estás bien? and they would all start jumping up saying, O mi Dios!, deeply impressed because not only was he a guy with excellent silent-walking ability, he also spoke their difficult language as well, and they would start asking him questions, most of which he couldn’t understand because they spoke even faster than Mrs. Burdick at school, but he would hold up his hand and say, Sí, Sí, mi nombre llamo Rusty, and they would fall down and practically worship him and his BMX racer because they’d never seen a person riding such a technological bike and he would be their king.

Such masterful writing.

This book made me laugh out loud. It made my throat close up with sadness. It made my heart race with uncertainty. And in the end, it made me really glad to have met these characters.
Good stuff people, good stuff.
XO,
Leah