Jessica Bruder (The New York Times)
The footage was eerie: dozens of girls in 19th-century prairie dresses, escorted by state troopers toward buses that would carry them off to an unfamiliar world. More than 400 children were temporarily removed from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Tex., in April 2008. Their lives, once hidden within the compound of the breakaway Mormon sect, were suddenly the stuff of national news. Courts are still untangling the disturbing allegations — were girls as young as 12 forced to marry middle-aged men? — but the questions that cut deepest, about society’s laws versus religious freedom, for example, are even harder to answer.
Fiction can offer emotional truth where other tools fail, and that’s what makes these two young adult novels — “The Chosen One,” by Carol Lynch Williams, and “Alis,” by Naomi Rich — so interesting. Both feature young women chafing against strict religious societies. Each protagonist is betrothed, against her will, to a much older man. And each book runs on the same engine of narrative tension: the heroine’s decision to gatecrash her way into mainstream society, leaving everything behind.
At their best the atmospherics of these novels recall Margaret Atwood’s powerful dystopia “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which has become a staple of high school reading lists. But they are also resonant because they magnify a leitmotif of adolescence: the struggle for self and independence.
“ ‘If I was going to kill the Prophet,’ I say, not even keeping my voice low, ‘I’d do it in Africa.’ ” That arrestingly offbeat meditation is the opening line of “The Chosen One” and our first introduction to Kyra, 13, who lives on a religious compound in the middle of a desert. Kyra feels guilty about many things: her fantasy of killing Prophet Childs and letting termites chew away the evidence; her habit of hiding in a tree behind her family’s trailer to read forbidden books like “Bridge to Terabithia”; her crush on Joshua Johnson, the blue-eyed boy who asks her for piano lessons.
But Kyra is soon faced with bigger worries. Prophet Childs declares that she must become the seventh wife of her cruel 60-year-old uncle, Apostle Hyrum. She’s horrified. Should she marry him, sacrificing her freedom and happiness for her family’s good name? Or should she escape, leaving behind 20 beloved siblings, three mothers and her gentle father?
Williams, herself a Mormon, unveils life among the Chosen (a fictitious theocracy) with spare, evocative writing and an honest sense of character that helps bridge the rift between Kyra’s world and ours. In one scene her family takes her off the compound to buy fabric for her wedding dress, and they stop for lunch at Applebee’s. Everyone gawks at them, and readers, most of us at least, are likely to be jolted by recognizing ourselves among the gawkers.
On occasion, Williams stretches plausibility. (Could Kyra’s furtive visits to a mobile library, where it stops just outside the compound, escape notice where every soul is under lock and key?) But thankfully, the nuanced ending — Kyra is free, but freedom isn’t easy — feels just right.
“Alis” is a fast-paced tale about a similar struggle, but its setting in an alternate time and place — an Olde England of sorts, with cobbled streets and horse-drawn carriages — robs emotional leverage from the plot. Alis, 14 years old, lives in a theocratic community, Freeborne, and has been ordered to marry a 40-year-old preacher. She dreams of escaping to “the city,” where her older brother is rumored to have taken refuge years ago. But both Freeborne and the city are alien to the reader, so the contrasts that made “The Chosen One” potent are absent here.
This story has other strengths, however, that make it hard to put down. Alis finally reaches the city, but it’s not the sanctuary she imagined — her brother, Joel, turns out to be the leader of a gang of petty thieves. Unprepared for the violence and tumult of their lives, Alis returns to Freeborne and her fate as a child bride. But her betrothed, Minister Galin, turns out to be a decent man, and when Alis leaves Freeborne again, it’s on her own terms, and with a suitor she chooses.
Alis and Kyra are both recognizable teenagers. But the cinematic drama of their lives, not to mention the fact that they’d both feel at home in “The Crucible,” is a means to reach a quieter truth, revealing that moment in childhood when you recognize your thoughts as your own and discover forces in the world that your parents cannot — or will not — protect you from. That moment brings freedom, but not without a cost.
Jessica Bruder teaches journalism at Columbia University and is the author of “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man.”