The Sound of Gravel

Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two children, raised on a farm in rural Mexico where the family lived without indoor plumbing or electricity. Her community practiced polygamy and preached that God would destroy the wicked and that women could ascend only by entering polygamous marriages and bearing many children. After Ruth’s father, the founding prophet of the colony, is murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarries as a second wife. Ruth and her siblings are shuttled between Mexico and the United States for welfare and work, and Ruth begins to doubt her family’s beliefs while trying to protect her siblings.