Of policemen and polygamists

Arrowtown book buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read and life as she sees it . . .

I had a policeman here on Monday giving us the very good news that the car one of our darling children had been in on their way back to Dunedin had been stopped doing 116kmh, and not one of the four passengers in the car, or the driver, had a full licence.

So the car (which belongs to the mother of a friend of theirs who wasn't with them) has been impounded for 28 days and will cost them all an arm and a leg to release, not to mention the whopping fine for speeding and carrying passengers.

And that is good news? Well, it's a lot better than other news policemen could be bringing about your children in cars, and I am very grateful to the officer who stopped them and has frightened the living daylights out of them all.

I was delighted to read in the Queenstown Times last week about Glenn Hardinge's programme to help some of the more challenging teenage boys in the district.

Teenage boys are frightening beasts.

They are a lot like men, really, with purely decorative ears and not much ability to think before acting.

I have been reading The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff, so I am now a bit of an expert on polygamy.

While The 19th Wife is a pretty sad story - I'm not sure any fundamentalist religious sect is a heap of fun to be part of unless you are top dog - I can definitely understand why there is no religious group set up where God tells the women they must have multiple husbands.

What a nightmare it would be.

Imagine 10 of them all lying around on the sofa watching sport and forgetting about the rubbish and opening and shutting the fridge door for no particular reason. But back to the book of Mormon mayhem - it is two stories very cleverly knitted together.

One is the true story of the 19th (well, she isn't really sure exactly what number she is) wife of the Mormon prophet Brigham Young, who separated from her husband and set out to have polygamy abolished.

Even Brigham Young was amazed at how much more interested people were in the number of wives he had, and how he managed them all, than in hearing the messages that God wanted him to spread.

I must admit that I have a lot more questions about polygamy than I do about the Mormon faith.

The second story is of a young man born into a modern-day polygamist sect in Utah.

He escapes, but when his father is murdered and his mother is arrested, he has to go back to that world to try to help her.

The two stories combine to show the full history of religious polygamy in the United States and try to explain exactly how a wife would feel when her husband brings home a nice new model, and how the whole system works.

They try to explain it, but it remains fairly mystifying.

I think God would have a pretty hard job persuading very many women in this district to accept it.

Polygamy seems to fascinate and horrify everyone, and it makes for great reading.

Jon Krakauer who wrote the brilliant mountaineering book, Into Thin Air went from mountains to fundamentalist Mormons with his Under the Banner of Heaven, his best-selling expose of this religious cult.

Enough of all that polygamy and stuff - for those of you who have told me you hate having to wait for the best books to come out in paperback, the wait is over if you want The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. $28 worth of fabulous reading about life on the Channel Island of Guernsey during the German occupation.

> Don't forget to email me on miranda@queenstown.co.nz if you have read something stunning or you just want to argue with me over anything.