When a caravan of women and children were ambushed by masked gunmen on a remote Mexican road, it sent political ripples through both Mexico and the United States. But this is not the first time the LeBaron and La Mora communities have been in the headlines.
Though this book uses the 2019 killings as the entry point into the story, it more broadly chronicles the history of this particular branch of the fundamentalist Mormon LeBaron family, which is well known for its polygamous practices and the spate of murders which took place as part of a religious blood feud in the 1970s.
The story is a startling and fascinating one – while I had heard different aspects of it in different places before, I appreciated how Denton brought them all together to make one cohesive whole. Where else do you get a story where drug cartels, water rights disputes, family murders, Mormon doctrine, and the NXIVM sex cult all had a part to play? I also enjoyed how Denton wove her own family history into the story to investigate why women might stay in such communities.
However, I did think the book would have been better had the author gone into more detail in the stories told. This is a pretty short book, with a chapter to cover each topic, but this does mean we get more of an overview of some topics. The book blurb promises to get into how these women navigated modern-day polygamy, but I felt that this promise was not entirely fulfilled – the men ended up on center stage, as usual.