Many in our culture are fascinated by polygamy, a popular topic of reality TV, dramas, and news media coverage. It is hard to look away when these stories focus on the most shocking details; almost everyone has seen images of women and young girls in long, buttoned-up dresses and old-fashioned, almost otherworldly hairstyles, their uniformity perceived as a sign of coerced submission. Sadie Hoagland’s mesmerizing novel, Strange Children, follows a group of young people from a fictional polygamist cult called Redfield, in Utah. Hoagland stitches together the past and present of this fundamentalist religious community through eight first-person narrators. The novel’s structure and rotating narrators gives voice to those still in the community, those banished, and speaks to the outside world’s perception of them. The story is told with compassion and intelligence that sheds light on the complexity of this topic — the abuse and indoctrination, the lasting impact of trauma, and also the bonds formed in a shared community.

The story begins with two teenagers caught having sex: The boy is banished from the community and left on the side of the road, the girl married off as a child bride. This starts a chain of events that changes the community and creates the doubt that begins to break the prophet’s tight hold on his followers. Yet, instead of focusing on the prophet who rules the community, Hoagland gives voice to the others and in so doing, the reader witnesses the unraveling of the community from the inside, as well as the impact of outsiders’ views on the community.

Hoagland successfully outlines how the power of coercion, fear, and a promise of a reward in the afterlife persuade people to believe in the godliness of a man, even as they watch him abuse others, or suffer from that abuse themselves. As a character remarks early on, “There are rules in God’s country, and those rules, if you obey them, keep you from burning in the flames of hell.” This is what the prophet, and the prophets before him, have drilled into every member of the community.

Another reflects on how his mother could stand to watch as he was banished from the community.

For his Mama, it meant everything.

Not just her other children. Her home. Her safety. But on top of that, a golden stairway. One that was so shining and magnificent, and they’d heard about so much that Jeremiah was sure that not even Haley’s mom could refuse it.

Later, after being turned out into the world, Jerimiah finds the same evil lurking everywhere, the same dangers away from the commune, and always longs for home: “Jeremiah had turned his thoughts to the red earth of home, the pale green sheath around the crick, the sounds of morning there. Birds, Roosters. Water in a bucket.”

Hoagland repeatedly calls upon characters who have been banished or removed from the community. Most surprising is their longing for home, even as they know they have been abandoned and abused. It is easy to assume that those who manage to escape should feel nothing but grateful and that leaving their world and entering society will fix everything.Yet through the various voices in this novel, Hoagland forces the reader to realize the deep and lasting bonds that develop between members of a small, insulated community that share childcare, work, and homes, even if it is a place of trauma. Hoagland also zeroes in on how unequipped outsiders are to help and fully understand what these children have experienced, and how our system is unable to holistically deal with these situations.

In one scene, the community watches as one of the men is arrested and the children are taken away:

We watched Mercy Ann, who was sweet on Levi and always over at our house so that it was hard not to think of her as one of our father’s, and she sat staring at the wheels on the van, sitting in the dirt with one of the babies of that brethren on her lap, sucking at her fingers and I wanted to go to her, and I knew we all did, want to go to them, knowing the different children in different ways, but we were too afraid that if we left the cool dark barn the sunlight of such a day as that would paint us the color of Holden’s children and we would be taken, too, with no one believing us that our father was a different man, still free, and standing at the fence, watching.

Elsewhere, a young girl taken from her mother and placed in foster care recites a litany of words, always circling back to home.

8) Me: My mothers, my sisters, my lamb, my bed, my room, my house, my road, my friends, my Pa, the spoon in my mouth, the dust in my nose, the water in my hair, the earth at my feet.

It’s clear what they leave behind — childhood memories, siblings and friends, love, comradery, and the small ways in which the characters take power and help each other.

Initially the different voices narrating this novel overwhelm the reader. A dead girl’s voice whispers into the ears of the living, narrating chapters interspersed throughout the book. Though at first hard to grasp, the dead girl’s narrative eventually reveals more about who she is. By the end, it is her voice that shows how doubt forms and the community starts to unravel. Meanwhile, the living speak words from the prophet and talk of the celestial kingdom. The cadence of the character’s voices are different, time flips around, and the world of this novel appears very alien from the one most readers know. Hanging over these young voices is that of the prophet, the man who claims to speak in the voice of God. But as the novel continues, each character’s voice sharpens into focus, and the multiple points of view provide space for the different truths to be spoken. There is not one story to tell in a situation like this, but many perceptions, carrying shared memories and also truths and burdens that are entirely their own.

Strange Children comes after Hoagland’s debut short story collection, American Grief in Four Stages. In her collection, she also explored grief and trauma, and the fresh insight she brought to those short stories is on display in her novel as well, as 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.

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