What's Mrs. U Reading Now?

I am reading The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine. I am always looking for historical fiction that my students would actually read. This is a difficult genre to "sell" and I hope this is one I can talk up to my students...

The Chosen One By Carol Lynch Williams

Wow! I was really impressed with this story. Cult stories are becoming fairly regular in the press these days, but it continues to fascinate me. Here's the product description:

"Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community without questioning the fact that her father has three wives and she has twenty brothers and sisters, with two more on the way. That is, without questioning them much—-if you don’t count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with Joshua, the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her.

But when the Prophet decrees that she must marry her sixty-year-old uncle—-who already has six wives—-Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family forever."

It's not only about the negative connotations you hear about, but about how much love can go on in a family like this one. The expectations and structure of the controlling cult is what is frightening. It's also interesting to read it from a girl's perspective who innately knows there's much more out there in the world for her and that she just doesn't belong in this world.