PositiveThe Wall Street JournalLike the trails where it begins, the book is craggy, meandering its way between loosely connected acts of violence and Mr. Hale’s ruminations about religion and redemption. But these difficulties are outweighed by Mr. Hale’s subjects and his willingness both to look at and to look beyond their worst moments ... It would be easy for a writer to make this into a cautionary tale about the danger of religious zealotry. And Mr. Hale does some of that ... The author is more successful showing that Bethany Clark’s murderers did not remain monsters ... It is to Mr. Hale’s great credit that he refuses to anathematize the prodigal children in his book.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksUlrich connects women’s organizing in Utah to deep-rooted traditions of female leadership within the church ... As Ulrich is well aware, and as her book demonstrates, none of this evidence for women’s leadership and activism obscures the intensely patriarchal nature of Mormonism ... If the language of rights-based activism was not as central to the lives of mid-19th-century Latter-day Saint women as Ulrich suggests, A House Full of Females nevertheless provides a needed and moving corrective to accounts of Mormon history dominated by men such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young ... While Ulrich provides a few examples of harmonious families, A House Full of Females leaves little doubt that Mormon polygamy was a colossal mess ... The women of A House Full of Females knew how to wield that weapon, and in stitching their stories together, so does Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
