Dorothy Allred Solomon - Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy

Ambiguity from a Child of Polygamy
Written: Mar 07 '04 (Updated Apr 21 '08)

Product Rating: Product Rating: 2.0
Pros: An interesting glimpse into a culture most of us know nothing about

Cons: Bland writing, author's irresolute stance on the main point of her memoir

The Bottom Line: A potentially interesting story in search of a message. Skip it or look for it at the library.

lyagushka's Full Review: Dorothy Allred Solomon - Predators, Prey, and Othe...
"I am the daughter of my father's fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children -- a middle kid, you might say,"

...With such an opening line, Dorothy Allred Solomon primes her readers to expect great things, startling things and fascinating things from her memoir, Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk. But in this she sells her audience short, for she manages to make a rather bland, middling account out of a childhood quite remote from the experiences of the vast majority of her readers. Her childhood was one of both material and emotional deprivations, of extended family scattered to the winds and a father murdered by a rival branch of the fundamentalist Mormon lunatic fringe. But if Solomon is predictably condemnatory of the lunatic fringe group responsible for the death of her patriarch father, she is disappointingly equivocal in her views of polygamist culture in which she was reared.

Solomon manages to convey the hunted feeling of her childhood in a family that was forced to conceal their polygamous nature. Taught early to lie about her family, Solomon also had to flee with her mother and "aunties" during the periodic police crackdowns on polygamists. But what really inspires sympathy for the author and her forty-seven siblings, and contempt for the practice of polygamy, is the continual state of poverty that resulted from their collective dependence on the income of one father and what little supplemental income the seven wives brought in through casual labor. Fearful of state authorities, the family never applied for welfare. In fact, most of the children were never issued birth certificates, lest the family patriarch be prosecuted for polygamy. Even more damning than financial poverty however, was the desperate sense of starvation for their father's attention and time that all the children felt and exhibited.

Solomon's writing is competent but otherwise unremarkable. Readable, but neither vivid nor evocative, it held my attention, but left no strong literary impression with me one way or the other. At least it never distracted me or got in the way of the storytelling, such as it was. To her credit though, she does allow practicing polygamists to emerge as fully rendered personalities, especially her father and his wives.

Solomon does weave in bits and pieces of early Mormon history here and there throughout her story. I found these historic bits to be rather interesting, but I can't say that Solomon treated Mormon history in anything approaching a comprehensive way. Not that a memoirist would be expected to do so, but if you're looking for an introductory book on the history of this church, this is not the book for you. Nor does it strike me as a good starting point for someone interested in polygamy. The book does incidentally give a glimpse of the culture of this particular group of polygamists, a culture centered on "raising up a righteous seed unto the Lord." In a nutshell, it seems to be all about babies, babies, babies. And woe betide the polygamist wife who cannot produce them.

While I believe in the truth of what Solomon writes, I feel that she shrinks from expressing herself fully, and I find this frustrating. Whether this hesitation stems from fear of further alienating her family or from a lack of decisiveness on her part, I cannot say. She gives clear examples of women and girls who were victimized in various ways by the system of polygamy, but continually stops short of criticizing the culture or the practice of polygamy itself. She gives free rein to her sometimes palpable anger only toward those she holds responsible for her father's murder. Perhaps it is not surprising that she refrains from vilifying the cultural system to which she owes her very existence in a literal sense of the word. She confides that just for having dared to buck the family tradition of polygamy, let alone write about it, she is regarded as the trouble-making black sheep of her enormous extended family.

Overall, the book is still a disappointment to me, for there are few people today who are able and willing to speak about polygamy from first-hand experience. In the end the author fails to justify the main title of her memoir. True enough, we are given full access to her childhood, but it is not made clear whom Solomon had in mind when she chose the words "predator" and "prey." Certainly there are plausible candidates to the observant reader. But what reason, other than coy marketing, would lead her to title her book so suggestively if she didn't plan to deliver? Hints and allusions are fine in fiction. In non-fiction I prefer writers to say what they mean. Growing up in polygamy is really all that Solomon has to sell on the memoir market; her life is otherwise completely unremarkable.

In case you haven't gotten the point by now, I can't recommend this book very highly. If you are seriously interested, and already have some background in Mormon history and personal narratives, or in the subject of polygamy, you may find it worth your time to read this book.


Interested in the subject of polyamory in general? You may find my review of a fraternally polyandrous Tibetan culture worth checking out.

If you're just interested in other memoirs, I recommend:
• What the Stones Remember - by Patrick Lane
• A Piece of Cake - by Cupcake Brown
• Julie & Julia - by Julie Powell
• Persepolis - by Marjane Satrapi
• Reading Lolita in Tehran - by Azar Nafisi
• My Part of the River - by Grace Foakes
• The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry - Kathleen Flinn