If you’ve been waiting for it, you can start listening today on Audible. It is also available on Amazon and will be on Apple Books later this week. The run time is 11 hours and 11 minutes.

Emmaline is narrated by actress Brianna Cohen, whose performances you may be familiar with from Orange is the New Black and several Lifetime and holiday films. Brianna captured Emmaline’s spirit beautifully, and I’m so thrilled for you to hear her interpretation of the novel.

As always, thank you for cheering on this project. Watching Emmaline find her readers has been one of the great joys of my life.

If you enjoy the audiobook, one of the most helpful things you can do is leave a rating or review wherever you listen.

And please check out Brianna Cohen’s upcoming projects:

· Ozark Mountain Christmas, coming on Great American Family on this November

· Girl in the Ground, coming soon on Lifetime

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Happy listening!

Get Emmaline on Audible here.

For months now we have been examining early Mormon polygamy, complex power dynamics in coercive faith systems, and the culture surrounding LDS historical narratives. I’ve found new friends, had great discussions, and grown in my own understanding as we have explored this territory together.

And we are going to keep doing that.

But today … today … I am finally ready to share that the first goal of The Emmaline Project has come to fruition, and you can now buy the novel wherever books are sold online!

To get your hands on the book more quickly, Amazon is your best bet. But most other book retailers have it as well.

Emmaline is your next read if:

• You love a rich, character-driven novel with a heroine you can root for.

• You’re interested in examining complex systems of faith and power that affect young women.

• You love a story that breaks your heart and gently puts it back together again.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. Sharing Emmaline with you is the honor of my lifetime. I can’t wait to hear what you think!

Peace and love,

Ashli

The documentary uncovers a severe case of abuse within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), which is an offshoot of the mainstream LDS Church. The focus of the show is a self-proclaimed prophet, Samuel Bateman. The horror of what happened under Bateman is difficult enough to comprehend. But the most disturbing part is the fact that none of this is new.

The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quit practicing polygamy in 1890 when the prophet Wilford Woodruff issued a proclamation, now commonly known as “The Manifesto.” It was released in response to severe legal pressure from the U.S. government, which threatened to confiscate church property and revoke civil rights for members.

On paper, polygamy ended in 1890. In reality, it just moved underground.

That history isn’t abstract to me.

My great-great grandfather, Samuel Sudbury, who is one of the inspirations for a character in my historical novel Emmaline, also played a significant role in helping keep polygamy underground. He served as custodian (security) for the Gardo House, a Victorian mansion used by church leadership in the late 19th Century to organize and hide polygamy.

“The Gardo House was a rendezvous where the brethren and sisters on the underground would often come in the night to meet their loved ones… Samuel Sudbury, a mysterious man, was custodian of the Gardo House and was ever on the alert for the approach of marshals and deputies searching for polygamists.”

– From the journal of John M. Whitaker, May 21, 1886

The manifesto was not accepted by every Mormon. Many held fast to LDS Scripture and believed it was a sign that the church was in apostasy. Some fled to Mexico or Canada where they could continue to practice plural marriage freely. Others began to hide in plain sight. Even today, polygamists hide under our noses all over the Salt Lake Valley. We see examples of how this functions in HBO’s Big Love and TLC’s Sister Wives. These polygamist families often operate independently of any defined Mormon sect and try to blend in by living modern lives. Some even continue attending LDS church services, but they are excommunicated if they are discovered.

Still others broke away entirely, forming new Mormon sects such as the FLDS to preserve what they believed was a divine commandment. These splinter groups have preserved the practice. But even worse, they intensified it.

The documentary tells the story of Samuel Bateman, a self-proclaimed prophet who rose to power after FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs’ imprisonment. Like Warren Jeffs, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young, Bateman claimed divine authority and used it to take wives.

Twenty-three wives to be exact. Nine of whom were minors. The youngest was 9 years old. You don’t need the documentary to understand what that means.

I was surprised by my reaction to the documentary. It wasn’t the facts that unsettled me most. It was the language. The echoes of what I’ve studied in the 19th-Century origins of the practice.

Statements from Bateman’s followers felt chillingly familiar:

• “We are living [Mormonism] fundamentally, in its purity.”

• “There’s no such thing as an underage marriage in the priesthood.”

• “Samuel is here to wake us up to where we’re headed if we don’t obey.”

• “Obedience is the first law of heaven.”

• “We groomed our girls for this. We’re not teaching them to question authority. We’re teaching them strict obedience.”

Here’s the scariest part: These are not the words of people who believe they are doing something wrong. They are the words of people who believe they are doing something righteous.

In many interviews, Samuel’s wives proclaimed their independent choice to participate, as well as the joy they experienced in Samuel’s home. But I couldn’t help notice the cold, dead eyes of the girls that betrayed their words, and the documentary uncovers why.

I have written before about my objections to 19th-century Mormon polygamy. You can read one of these essays here: Why I won’t be neutral about Mormon polygamy. I have never equivocated in my stance that it was wrong. But watching the documentary forced me to sit with the uncomfortable truth that it lives on today.

Joseph Smith’s doctrine on plural marriage continues to empower men who would be prophets. Men who just need a religious excuse to exert sexual power over young women. It continues as canon in LDS Scripture, which causes confusion for members of the modern church and empowerment for men seeking to dominate submissive young women.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Joseph Smith was as perverted and abusive as Samuel Bateman. History is more nuanced than that. Motivations were different, and historical context paints a more complicated story with Smith.

But ideas have consequences. And every generation since—beginning with Brigham Young—has found ways to push those ideas further.

More control.
More isolation.
More harm.

The modern LDS Church often responds to fundamentalist groups by saying: “They have nothing to do with us.” But the doctrine still exists. The history still exists.

The line between then and now is not as clean as some would like it to be. What I saw from all the men and women in this documentary wasn’t an outlier. It was a continuation and evolution of Joseph Smith’s teachings on polygamy.

Can the mainstream church undo the damage being done today? I don’t know. But a good start would be to acknowledge it’s part in this mess. Meanwhile, more women and girls will pay the price.

But not too long. “Because the Lord has already spoken.” The room is full. Every eye is on her.

She is a 14-year-old girl who has been told that God has chosen her to become the second wife of a man she does not love. A man she does not even like. A man who is twice her age and already married to another woman.

The bishop’s voice is calm and lyrical, almost kind, as he explains what God requires. This is not a burden, he says. It is a blessing. One reserved for the faithful. One that will secure not only her eternal future, but also her mother’s.

She keeps her hands folded in her lap. She does not speak. She understands what has already been decided.

This is not a question. It is not even a request.

It is a demand for obedience, dressed up as a choice.

He gives her just enough space to allow the pretense that she has a say in what happens next. Enough time to pray and receive “right” answer. But not enough time to refuse or to gather the strength it would take to stand up and say no.

She knows the consequences. If she refuses, she risks her eternal salvation. If she refuses, she risks her mother’s healing. If she refuses, she stands alone in a place where she is without the resources to care for herself.

So she does what they are asking her to do.

She says yes.

And everyone in the room understands that she was never free to say anything else.

In two weeks she will turn fifteen. And she will be his bride.

This is a paraphrased scene from my novel, Emmaline. And because it is historical fiction, we want to believe that what happened to girls like her remains locked inside history books.

We want to believe that what took place in that room is a part of a system that has collapsed. This wouldn’t happen today, we believe. We wouldn’t let it happen if we knew about it. We would protect her,

But the coercion and subjugation of girls is not just an unfortunate part of history. It is still with us. It may look different, but it didn’t go away.

When we write historical fiction, we get to examine a specific story from a specific time and place. But don’t mistake the plot for the message. We are really telling a much larger human story.

The fate of girls in 2026

Today, according to UNICEF, more than 12 million girls are married before they turn 18. Every single year. A staggering 650 million women alive right now were married before their 18th birthday. Often to much older men.

India has the largest number of child brides in the world. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest percentage. Though the rates are declining, far too many girls still face coerced marriages. Families marry daughters young due to poverty, debts, and fear of sexual violence or “dishonor.”

In places like Niger, the majority of girls will become brides before they reach adulthood. In Yemen, some are married at 10 or 11. Across the Middle East, families facing hunger, instability, and religious or social pressure marry their daughters early.

And in Canada and the American West, splinter LDS groups like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are doing it right under our noses.

The settings may be different. The language may be different.

But the outcome is the same.

A girl is told this is what is best. She is told it will protect her. She is told it will save her family. She might even be told she has a choice.

But like Emmaline, she understands what will happen if she says no.

The harm is concrete and measurable:

• Higher rates of maternal death

• Increased risk of domestic violence

• Loss of education and economic independence

No child should bear the weight of her family’s safety and security. No child should be married before her body has finished puberty. No child should be married to meet somebody else’s desire for comfort or control.

No child should be married. Period.

And yet we continue to offer the bodies of our girls as living sacrifices. We continue to look the other way.

What can we do?

First, we can stop looking the other way. Tell their stories. Say their names. Call out the harm.

We can welcome refugees, address the poverty that drives unthinkable survival choices, and offer alternatives.

We can support the organizations working quietly and persistently to improve the lives of girls around the world—supporting girls’ education, delaying early marriage, creating alternatives where none seem to exist.

They are seeing some success as the global rate of child brides slowly drops. But they need attention. They need funding. They need people who are willing to see this clearly and refuse to dismiss it as someone else’s problem. Here are just three of the organizations doing the work:

Girls Not Brides

UNICEF

Holding out Help

The first step in ending a system like this is refusing to pretend it is over.

They help other readers discover stories they might otherwise miss. If you would like to read Emmaline early while helping support the launch, you can apply using the form below. I’m so grateful for this community and the encouragement you’ve given this project from the beginning.

https://forms.gle/vu3xYQNppXC2Y3dJ8

Advance copies will go out next week!

https://a.co/d/0gvyuTXK

After years of dreaming, researching, and writing it is an honor to bring this story to life.

EMMALINE

A deadly journey.

A broken promise.

An unthinkable choice.

Full book description on Amazon.

The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere is beautiful from an airplane. From thirty thousand feet, it sparkles—a shimmering inland sea in the desert, where God’s people gathered. You can’t deny the comparison to the Dead Sea. It’s as if God himself put it there to really land the biblical metaphor.

But up close, the lake smells like death. Nothing but brine and algae survive in the water, and the sand is infested with little black brine flies. As anyone in Utah can attest to, almost no one local goes to the lake on purpose. It is for tourists. And they only go once.

That feels metaphorical as well, but I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions.

I was raised in Utah, but not in The Church™. Which, in the 1970s and 80s Salt Lake Valley, was a bit like being raised in Italy but not eating pasta. Belonging meant constantly explaining yourself. That’s not so easy for a kid.

My dad had left The Church™ at 18 and instead chosen “a church.” These are very different things in Utah.

His was a quiet exit, a slow fade. Or so he thought. Twenty years later, The Church™ was still knocking on our front door once a month to collect fast offerings. No amount of asking or telling them not to come stopped the monthly collection visits. It didn’t matter that we gave tithes and offerings at our own church. His name was on their books, so those poor boys were required to knock on our door and ask for the money.

That is why, in 1984, he requested excommunication. Maybe it was for my mother’s peace, maybe it was to spare those poor boys who had to come knocking for money on Sunday afternoons. It was probably both. In any case, excommunication was the only way to get your name off the books in those days.

I like to say he was excommunicated before being excommunicated was cool. Before the John Dehlin and Kate Kelly era (IYKYK). He had no podcasts or exMormon TikTok influencers to look to for guidance. He just called and said he wanted out. They said they had to find him to be in apostasy before they would let him go.

The bishopric came to our home several times to see what an apostate family looked like discuss his intentions and beliefs. We all sat together in the living room as a family. I played the clarinet for them, because nothing says “we have irreconcilable theological differences” like homemade cookies and a middle schooler with a clarinet. Even at the age of 12, I sensed they wanted to see a broken family. I wanted them to know we were a good family.

Then they held a church trial for him. I was not allowed to attend that. But he was officially found guilty of Apostasy ™. This ensured his eternity in hell, but at least the money collectors stopped coming.

The LDS church doesn’t just let people leave. Back then you had to be formally dismissed for moral failing, polygamy, or apostasy. My dad chose apostasy because he’s a morally upright man, and my mom wasn’t interested in polygamy.

Today you need a notarized letter from a lawyer if you want to avoid a very painful process. Don’t get me wrong: nobody is going to physically make you attend, but they won’t stop showing up at your home, sending texts with your cleaning assignments, or forwarding your information to your new bishop as long as your name is on their books. One of the main jobs of Mormon missionaries is to “reactivate” those who have stopped attending. If you don’t believe me, browse the exMormon subReddit, where some 230,000 people regularly discuss their issues over trying to exit informally.

There’s something unsettling about a church that won’t let you leave. I understand why Mormons don’t like the C word, but if you want to know why outsiders think it, this is one of the main reasons. But that’s a different essay.

Utahns also bristle at the word theocracy. I understand why. It sounds overly dramatic. But historically speaking, it was by design. The so-called State of Deseret was meant to be a theocracy. A kingdom outside the borders of the United States preparing for a millennial reign in the only place they would be safe from judgment.

Here’s the part that makes this complicated: I love Utah.

I love the otherworldly blue of the Rocky Mountains, with their contrasting, pristine white snowcaps. I love the smell of sage brush and pine. I love the grid system. I love that I always know which way is east. I love the cool, dry summer evenings. I love my family and friends. And I would aggressively defend fry sauce in every state of the union.

(I do not understand Swig, but I accept that this may be a personal failing.)

Still, when I graduated from high school I left. I’m more at home in the Midwest, where all the churches look different and I don’t have to explain why I don’t eat the pasta. I visit my family in Utah at least once a year. When I’m in Utah, I often criticize it. When I’m outside of Utah, I often defend it. This is my sibling dynamic with the state. I can say things about it. You cannot.

Most of the people I grew up with inside The Church™ were kind, generous, and thoughtful people. I love them. The everyday lived experience in Utah is not uncomfortable for most people. It’s hiking and skiing and cheering for the Jazz. It’s PTA meetings and carpools and neighbors shoveling your sidewalk.

The Great Salt Fake isn’t about the ordinary goodness of ordinary people.

It’s about whether the sparkle is real.

The Days of ‘47

In 1847, LDS church president Brigham Young began the gathering of the faithful to Zion. The covenant community. The New Jerusalem. The chosen valley in the desert. The language was powerful. It was lifted from ancient scripture and reimagined for a nineteenth-century American restoration.

They were words that moved desperate people.

And desperate people did move. From Great Britain. From Scandinavia. From Germany. From many places where opportunity was thin and hope was thinner. They crossed oceans and plains for a promise.

What they found was something much more complicated.

Polygamy, for instance, was an open secret for many years. First publicly denied and privately practiced, then openly expected. Some had been taught the principle before they left their homes. Others did not know until they arrived. Later officially renounced, it continued in covert ways for years. Currently, it is mandated in LDS Scripture but forbidden in practice. It’s remarkable how often revelation and institutional growth seemed to align in those years (as it does today).

That doesn’t mean nothing good happened. But it doesn’t mean nothing bad happened either. And that’s the real fake-out.

It isn’t that everything was false. It’s that the official narrative of The Church™ doesn’t acknowledge or make amends for the harm that happened in its past or present. It doesn’t tell the truth about how its scripture came to be. It doesn’t tell the truth about families who lost half their members on the journey to Zion because of poor institutional leadership. It doesn’t tell the truth about barely pubescent girls being coerced into polygamy when they arrived. And it rarely acknowledges how difficult it was to leave once you were inside the system. It was infinitely harder then than it is now.

America’s Zion has always been good for some and bad for others. Today, people on the margins—those who don’t fit the mold—still pay the price. LGBTQ youth in Utah attempt and die by suicide at disturbing rates. Women remain barred from the priesthood, just as Black members were until 1978. Until then, Black members weren’t even allowed into temples to participate in the rites believed to secure exaltation.

This isn’t conjecture. The Church™ has officially said through its current president, Dallin H. Oaks, that they do not seek or offer apologies.

The Great Salt Lake still sparkles from above. You don’t smell the algae and brine at cruising altitude. You just see the beauty.

I’m limiting my total voting pool to about 20 people .. because too many cooks in the kitchen as they say…

I would love to have about 10 voices from Substack to be part of the decision.

If this sounds like you, drop a message in the comments and I’ll reach out when it’s time.

And I can’t wait for the final cover reveal coming soon!

Writing 94,000 coherent words came more easily than I expected. With Emmaline, I would dare say the story found me. And it found me at the right time. If you’re a writer you know how it feels when that combination hits—right person, right story, right time—it’s like magic.

The first draft poured out of me in about four months. That was followed by two full revisions, a month allowing a handful of beta readers to road test it, and then writing a fourth draft based on the incredible input I got from my beta readers. I hired an editor, showed it to a few more beta readers and did more revisions. So there was a lot of writing. As they say, writing is rewriting.

But most of that process was personal. A secret between me and my keyboard. I found the writing journey to be almost sacred. It was like everything I’ve ever done in my career came together to help me finally do work that is truly for me. The big, brave thing I always dreamed of doing. It was interesting, rewarding, and joyful.

Yes, the writing part was easy.

The day it got hard was the day I decided to tell the world.

Whether you are publishing traditionally or independently, most of the marketing will be up to you. A lot of people don’t know this, but unless you’re a celebrity author, publishers do very little of the marketing for you. So not only do you have to be brave enough to put your story out into the world, you have to be brave enough to put your face out there too.

You will need an online presence. A personal brand. A mailing list. For best results you need to build this months ahead of time. And there’s only one way to do it: In front of everybody you know.

Facebook, Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn, name your favorite social media site here. You have to start acting like an author before you are one. And that takes confidence.

So if you’ll allow me to be vulnerable for a moment, I’ll tell you a secret about me. One that my family and very close friends know, but my “audience” doesn’t. I am pretty good at acting confident, but I struggle with being confident. I am willing to put myself out there, but I am a little bit terrified to be out there.

This is both the best and scariest thing I have ever done. It is the equivalent of standing in front of a room filled with everyone I know and shouting, “I’m doing something. Come watch to see if I fail. Bring popcorn.”

Even as my audience of strangers grows, I live in fear that the people who know me are shaking their heads and wondering who I think I am. (It’s possible it’s just the voices in my own head saying that, but I’ll never be sure.)

One of my favorite quotes is by Samuel Beckett:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

And so I film the Instagram reels. But I die a little inside every time I hit publish. And then I plan the next one. (Obsess about stats? Who me?) And, yes, I feel exposed every time I show up here. I still wonder who’s watching, what they’re thinking, whether I’m brave or just reckless.

But the story matters more than my fear. I didn’t write this book for it to live in my laptop. The girls whose lives inspired Emmaline didn’t have the luxury of speaking. The least I can do is tell their story well and help it find the readers who need it.

If you’re here reading this—whether you’ve been following for months or just found this space—thank you for being part of the little experiment that is bringing this book into the world.

And if you have a dream, go chase it. Let’s be brave together.

Last weekend in a subscriber chat, someone asked how I researched my book (thank you, Ashleigh!). It’s a great question that speaks to the heart of our responsibility to ethical storytelling.

That question felt especially timely this week, because I made a new acquaintance whose life also intersects directly with the history behind Emmaline. Connecting with someone who shares the history from a different branch of the family tree brought history into the present for me. But we’ll come back to that.

Research as foundation

Research is foundational in historical fiction. You’re not just telling a story. You’re transporting readers to a specific time and place, hoping both to entertain and to illuminate history that helped shape the present. That carries responsibility, especially when you’re dealing with a subject matter that is as loaded as religion and polygamy.

Novelists have wide latitude in fictionalizing characters, dialogue, and storylines. But readers reasonably expect accuracy in the historical context. The social norms, geography, language, culture, and historical events have to be right.

Historians and novelists often begin in the same places: dates, records, maps, newspapers, diaries, etc. The difference is what happens next. Historians ask what happened. Novelists get to ask a different question: What would it feel like to live through it?

Between the layers of facts, humanity and emotion emerge. That’s the heart of storytelling in historical fiction. Ideally it is informed by research, empathy, and imagination.

The real story behind Emmaline

Emmaline is mostly set in the early LDS settlement of Utah, when polygamy was not just cultural but, for many, theologically mandated. But the story begins earlier, in England, where thousands of families joined the Mormon church and followed missionaries across the Atlantic in search of faith, opportunity, and protection from judgment.

Through Emmaline’s perspective, I explore those motivations and the realities that followed: emigration by ship, rail travel to Iowa, and ultimately the 1,300-mile handcart trek west. During the writing process, I kept that one guiding question at the forefront: What would it feel like to live through it?

Emmaline is inspired by a real young woman named Lydia Franklin. At 14, she emigrated from England and was a part of the Martin Handcart Company. It was a brutal and tragic trek across the country. Shortly after arriving in Utah, she was sent to a home under the pretense of rest and recovery and then told she was expected to become the husband’s second wife. She was sealed to him soon after her fifteenth birthday, despite her resistance.

Lydia did what she had to do to survive. But eventually, she escaped. It was an extraordinarily rare outcome. How that happened is, of course, the climax of the book.

Lydia left behind a lengthy unpublished autobiography that helped inform many details as well as the emotional landscape of the novel, but as the book developed, Emmaline became a composite character representing many young girls whose experiences were often minimized or erased from official narratives.

My goal was not to reconstruct Lydia’s life verbatim, but to honor her courage while telling a story about all the girls that is historically sound and emotionally resonate.

When history becomes personal

There’s a twist to my connection with this history. I am not Lydia’s descendant. I descend from one of the other wives. My great-great grandfather is Samuel Sudbury, the man who coerced Lydia into a plural marriage she did not want.

Writing this book meant identifying deeply with the victim while also reckoning with the fact that the perpetrator sits in my own family line. That tension shaped how I approached the story.

This week I had the amazing opportunity to connect with Roger Gardner, one of Lydia’s great-grandsons. He descends from her second marriage and has spent years researching his family history. Our conversation quickly became collaborative. We traded documents, photos, and stories, filling in missing pieces that we both had. Roger’s graciousness has enriched my relationship with the history in Emmaline.

Real life does not wrap up neatly like a good novel. Neither Roger nor I know whether Lydia experienced a tidy “happily ever after.” We know she married again, had more children, and kept moving forward. But she must have carried her trauma though those years.

Samuel, Lydia’s first husband, later married another polygamous wife, and that wife became my great-great grandmother. Samuel’s many descendants will all interpret that history differently. Some may see faithfulness to a religious mandate. Some may see the harm in those choices. Most likely hold some mixture of both.

As Roger and I talked, I found myself feeling an urge to apologize for what my ancestor had done to his. But Roger said something powerful:

“We are not responsible for our ancestors’ actions.”

Our job is to learn from history as we honor their resilience and strive to do better where they fell short, as we hope our descendants will also do. That realization affected how I think about history. Research isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about our relationship to the past, the present, and the future.

Those deeper questions about who we are and how we live are the gift this history has given me.

Chapter Thirteen (partial)

“Seventeen pounds!” hollered President Martin. “Every man, woman, or child may have seventeen pounds of personal effects only. Line up at a weigh station to have your belongings weighed and inspected.”

We’d heard it a dozen times. I didn’t see why he had to shout about it again.

I lined up with my stack of belongings. One extra dress, my woolen shawl, my journal and pen, my grandmother’s quilt, and a bedroll. I figured I was well under seventeen pounds, having left nearly everything in England. But we also had to add our cookware and utensils, which increase the weight quickly.

My mother had the family Bible and Book of Mormon, the christening gown, the rag doll from her childhood, the butter dish carved by her father, and the box of letters to add to her stack. She had sewn the pocket watch and brooch into her dress.

Once we distributed our belongings among the three of us, we felt we could travel lightly. We would have to leave only our trunk behind. Though I felt sorrow at parting with it—the one constant through all our travels, the keeper of our past—I was relieved we wouldn’t have to abandon any of the precious items inside.

We lined up for inspection behind Gideon and Eli Ashford.

“No!” Gideon shouted. “I will not do it. I will not put my pa through this indignity and make this ungodly trek and then discard my books too. I will not do it! And my pa will not leave his fiddle!”

“Son, you’ll have to choose,” said a kind elder. “Seventeen pounds only.”

Brother Martin came to diffuse the situation. They would not be the first family who required his intervention.

“Mind your tongue, boy. We’ll not tolerate such talk. Now calm yourself, and we’ll speak on it.”

We moved through the inspection process while they talked. I overheard Brother Ashford kindly explaining that they had tools, a rifle, a tin flask of gun powder, and a bundle of shot.

“These items will be for the benefit of all the Saints,” he said, trying to negotiate. “Perhaps they could be carried on a supply wagon so that we could take some personal effects.”

“No, we’ll not be partin’ with them, Pa!” Gideon cried. “We’ll never get them back.”

Brother Martin cut in, “You’ll not need a hunting rifle. The Lord has provided for all the Saints. There are rations enough for everyone.”

Gideon tried one more time: “Please,” his voice breaking with desperation. “I’ll give up my books if you’ll let him take the fiddle. That fiddle has been in our family for three generations.”

“Seventeen pounds,” said President Martin.

He spoke without compassion, and my cheeks burned with anger.

Brother Ashford stared at the fiddle case a long while, his hands clenching around the leather strap. For a moment the silence held nothing but grief.

“The tools,” he finally said, his voice hoarse. “And the rifle. The rest can be left.”

Gideon stomped back to camp, defeated. Around us a flurry of activity continued. Mothers tended to restless children, men tightened cart wheels, the last few Saints weighed their belongings. No one else seemed to notice what had happened. No one but me.

I couldn’t stop watching Brother Ashford. He lingered, shoulders hunched, staring at the instrument that had been his for so long. Then, without a word, he picked up the fiddle and carried it out of camp.

I followed at a distance, slipping between trees until I found a place to sit, unseen.

Before long I heard the most sorrowful version of “Amazing Grace” cry out from Brother Ashford’s fiddle.

The low, mournful notes caused an aching in my chest I couldn’t understand. I watched as this gentle and loving man—who had used his beloved fiddle to bring joy to the Saints on board the Horizon, at weddings, at dances, and hymn sing-alongs—now played his last song. He played it as if he didn’t know where his fingers ended and the fiddle began.

And then I watched him set it down on a rock and kiss the case softly. He walked away sadly, his grief palpable. I ducked behind the tree, ashamed to have witnessed something so raw and personal. I don’t know if Brother Ashford was crying, but tears were streaming down my face.

All afternoon and into the evening, I watched similar scenes with other families. Desperate Saints negotiated and pleaded for exceptions to the weight requirements. A growing pile of goods was left at the weigh stations, the ground cluttered with books, heirloom tea sets, china, portraits, toys, clothes, and boots. All symbols of lives being left behind.

The cost of faith seemed so high.

Read Emmaline this spring for the rest of the story.

I could link article after article dispensing this advice, but I’m not interested in calling out anyone specifically. It’s common “wisdom,” not owned by any one person.

Still, I have to work hard not to feel triggered every time I encounter it, because it is written by someone who:

• Hasn’t read your work

• Doesn’t know how much training or experience you have

• Dispenses this advice broadly as an antidote to query rejection, without explaining that agents only take on a tiny fraction of the queries they receive

• Doesn’t know why this particular book might be the book for you

When I faced agent rejection—impersonal, form-letter rejection that is brutal not because of what it says, but because of what it doesn’t—I started looking for guidance that was honest instead of dismissive. (In the interest of transparency, one agent did send me a kind and personal note about how and why she liked my writing but just didn’t have the bandwidth for the project; and another agent expressed enthusiastic interest and asked to read the full manuscript and then ghosted me—a very common experience for querying writers).

Here’s one thing every hopeful debut author should know: almost no one in traditional publishing will give you a personal evaluation of your work unless you pay for it. And if you pay for their coaching services, they are ethically unable to represent you. You will face months or years of rejection, and you’ll never be told why.

I refused to accept the Internet’s advice to “throw away my first book,” and in the process, I accidentally developed a framework for deciding whether you should toss your pages into Amy March’s proverbial fire—or whether you should press ahead with indie publishing instead.

It starts with asking yourself some uncomfortable questions and being honest about the answers:

• Do I believe in this book?

• Do I know how to write, or do I need more training first?

• Do I understand the conventions of my genre, and did I follow them?

• Can I clearly identify the audience for this work?

• Did I revise obsessively, with the help of alpha readers, beta readers, and a professional editor?

• Did those readers and editors genuinely love the book?

• Is this a story that will not let me go?

• Am I intrinsically motivated to see this book exist—or am I primarily seeking validation from traditional publishers?

• Do I have the skills to publish and market my work? If not, am I willing to learn them?

If you can answer these questions honestly and affirmatively, I believe in you. I do not think you should throw away your book.

It was only when I stopped chasing external validation from agents and started believing in myself that my book became real. That was also the moment I started having fun.

Here’s what I’ve learned about agents (and I’m sure most of them are lovely people): they are gatekeepers in a system that is nearly as broken as the U.S. healthcare system. They cannot reliably discover the best books and move them through the pipeline any more efficiently than a triage nurse can get you through an emergency room in less than twelve hours.

This isn’t anything agents don’t say themselves. They are operating under enormous constraints:

• Hundreds of queries hitting their inboxes every month—sometimes every day

• Room for only one or two debut authors a year on their list

• Risk-averse, trend-chasing publishers trying to predict what will sell two or three years from now

• No time to meaningfully evaluate unsolicited work, because their real job is representing their existing clients

And here’s another truth bomb that many debut authors don’t know: signing an agent is no guarantee that you’ll get a book deal. Many books stall out on submission to potential publishers.

But here’s the thing: indie publishing exists now. It is disrupting traditional publishing the way the internet disrupted journalism.

If you choose the indie route, you can’t be just a writer anymore. You have to become a publisher and a business owner. But if you believe in your book—and you have the chutzpah to do what it takes to sell it—there is no reason to keep waiting for permission from gatekeepers.

Your book deserves to exist. So does mine.

If rejection in the traditional publishing world has stalled you, don’t confuse that with a verdict on your work. Traditional publishers will still require you to market your book. It offers no guarantee of success. And even for the lucky few who break through, it will slow you down by a year or more.

And, spoiler alert: Lorelai Gilmore’s first pancake turned out really good.

If you decide to set aside your first book, that’s fine. But do it on your own terms—not because someone who hasn’t read it wrote an article advising you to throw it out.

If you believe your book has a place in the world, go make your art. Bring it to life.

You don’t need permission anymore.

Photo by Beyza Yalçın, pexels

I’ve been quiet for the last couple of weeks while my husband recovered in the hospital from surgical complications. He’s home now and doing better, and I’m grateful to be back at the keyboard. In the meantime, nearly twenty-five new readers have joined this project, bringing us to seventy-nine subscribers. I don’t take that lightly. Thank you for choosing to read along.

If you’re new here, you may want to start with my introductory essay to get oriented to The Emmaline Project and the issues we’re exploring.

Today, though, I want to skip ahead.

I’m sharing Chapter Four—one of the emotional and moral turning points of the novel. Emmaline is thirteen years old in this chapter, still living in Liverpool. She is still a child, old enough to sense danger but not old enough to fully understand what it will mean for her.

This chapter draws heavily from a primary source: Lydia’s autobiography, in which she recounts the moment polygamy was first introduced into her family. The strongest reaction does not come from the child. It comes from the mother. Emmaline watches her mother absorb the news, and in doing so begins to grasp what this new religion may demand of women, wives, and families.

This is not a chapter about doctrine. It’s about a child realizing that something has entered her home that she cannot control.

Will her father be asked to take another wife?

What would that mean for her mother?

And what will it mean for the life Emmaline thinks she understands?

Perhaps if you’ve grown up in Mormonism you’ve imagined this moment. Here is what happens in Emmaline’s home when the news arrives.

Emmaline: Chapter Four

“It is a damnable practice! Thousands will reject the gospel, and it’ll be the end of the church.”

My mother’s desperate voice woke me up as my parents returned late from a meal they’d been invited to that evening with visiting elders from the States.

“What is it?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “What’s going on?”

“That Elder Stowell—he spoke to us tonight about the principle of plural marriage,” my father said.

“Plural marriage?”

“Polygamy!” my mother shouted, her body shaking, her green eyes burning with anger. “Men havin’ more than one wife. And they’re practicin’ it in Zion!”

“Now, Ruthie,” Father said gently, “calm yerself for a moment. Don’t be forgettin’ what the elders said. David and Solomon practiced it, and they were men after God’s own heart.”

“I s’pose this idea doesn’t bother you. Sounds right appealin’ to the husbands, eh? But the womenfolk won’t stand for it. They won’t.”

He softly took hold of her shoulders, but I noticed his hands were trembling. He kissed her forehead. “You know I want no wife but you.”

She began to weep. “He said it’s a commandment. A commandment!” She collapsed on the bed, sobbing.

That night Mother barely spoke another word. By morning, she had taken to her bed ill and would not rise again for a fortnight. We could not compel her to eat.

“I shall not take a bite again, Emmaline, until Heavenly Father himself reveals the answer to me,” she said.

Our little home felt darker than usual. She didn’t like lanterns lit for they hurt her eyes. And the brightness of her countenance, which for the past year had warmed us, had vanished beneath a pile of quilts.

Father said I should stay with her each day and try to get her to eat and drink. I brought her water and weak tea, which she sometimes sipped. She spoke little, only fasting and praying, begging the Lord for an answer about polygamy.

For his part, Father spent longer days at the docks and late evenings at the meeting house. He was troubled, that was easy enough to see, but he didn’t seem to know how to help her, and he didn’t want to talk about it with me.

“Do something, Father,” I pleaded one evening. “You’re the only one who can help her.”

“I can’t help her, Emma,” he said softly. “She must work it out with the Lord.”

“Have you worked this out with the Lord?” I asked, needing to know if he accepted it.

“I trust the prophet.” His tone that told me the conversation was over.

One evening he brought Elder Stowell to offer a blessing. The elder anointed her head with oil and prayed aloud, saying he knew she was an earnest sister and that the Lord would convince her of the holiness of the principle. If she remained faithful, he said, the Lord would show her.

As he left, I followed him out the door.

“Brother Stowell,” I began.

“Yes, child?”

I stuttered. I couldn’t find the courage to speak the questions burning inside me: Why? Why is this a holy and pure principle? Why must this be asked of my mother?

Instead, I said, “Thank you,” and my eyes filled with tears as he walked away.

My heart ached for my mother. I knew she was zealous in her belief in the Prophet Joseph Smith and the restored gospel. I had watched her devote everything to it. And in return it had brought her back to life. We had heard whisperings of polygamy—accusations shouted by those who taunted us on the streets—but she had not believed them. Neither had I. We couldn’t avoid it anymore now that the elders were teaching it here in Liverpool.

I wondered if this would be the end of our membership in the church. I thought of Eliza, of the choir and pageants. I thought of the mission house and the meals. I didn’t want to lose any of it. But I agreed with my mother about this so-called principle: It was a damnable doctrine.

On the fifteenth day, my mother rose from bed early, two hours before Father was to leave for the docks. She woke us both and said she had a vision to relate.

“In the night, the heavens were opened to me, and I was shown that Joseph Smith is truly called of God, and that the Saints walk in the only faith that leads to salvation. I beheld angels descending from above, gathering near Brother Stowell as he spoke. The sky itself bore witness that the words he carries are meant for all the children of this earth. I was made to understand that those who receive it will be preserved, and that sorrow awaits those who turn away. Woe to any who reject the principle.”

I watched with awe, and not a little confusion. A chill ran from the top of my head down to my toes. I couldn’t reconcile her words with her appearance. Her chestnut hair was tangled and oily from a fortnight in bed. Her flannel gown hung askew. Her voice was calm, even certain. But her lifeless green eyes betrayed her.

She said it was the Lord, but I believed she had surrendered—to the elders, to the weight of expectation, to our family’s need to belong. But I didn’t speak those thoughts aloud. They stayed hidden in my heart. So many of my thoughts remained concealed in those days. I was thirteen by that time, and I would not find my voice for several more years. My outward self was merely a reflection of the choices made for me.

What my father thought, I never knew. He never spoke of it again.

Life returned, for the most part, to the way it had been before the words “plural marriage” were first spoken by my parents. Father went to the docks each morning. I helped Mother with the mending. I committed large portions of scripture to memory. The principle of plural marriage was still whispered about, but I never heard much fuss about it again.

Not while we were in England.

AI illustration

The men in the courtyard were causing quite a stir. Father had just come in from the docks, his dark brown curls dusted with coal and his freckled face still streaked black. He said it looked like some missionaries were outside. Mother and I silently scraped skins off potatoes for supper, but the noise was becoming too much to ignore. Father went out to investigate, and Mother and I set down our paring knives and followed.

We saw two well-dressed street preachers who had drawn a small crowd in the twilight. The setting sun broke through the clouds, casting golden light on their heads—as if God himself had placed them there.

The men looked almost identical to one another. They wore starched white shirts with crisp, dark gray waistcoats and neatly pressed woolen trousers. With trimmed brown hair and beards, I guessed them to be about my father’s age.

They had polished leather shoes, fancier than anything I had ever seen, and the one who spoke carried several leather books. One of the books looked like a newer version of our old family Bible. I wasn’t sure what the other book was.

I had never seen such gentlemen standing in our soot-covered courtyard. They stood out from the crowd of dockworkers who all wore scuffed leather boots, patched-up woolen trousers, and dirty linen shirts covered with grime and sweat from a hard day’s work.

The ministers’ presence commanded attention, and they spoke with eloquence that captivated the swelling crowd gathered around them.

“You have prayed many times for blessings. Blessings of shelter and plenty on your table for your children and yourselves. There is a Holy Spirit ready to pour out temporal and eternal blessing upon you even at this time.”

The words of the minister drew my father closer. I watched my mother follow him. Though her dark brown cotton dress and white apron were well worn, they were clean, and she walked with quiet dignity. I watched her untie her rose-colored headscarf to reveal her neatly pinned-up chestnut hair, a small gesture that felt like an act of deference to the preachers.

It was not the first time we had heard about prayers and blessings. We were members of the Church of England, like everyone we knew. But there was something charismatic about these preachers, about the way they spoke of blessings. I continued to watch from the doorway of our home.

They began to tell the most curious story.

“Many of you are faithful Christians. You know how the Lord has, in every age, raised up prophets. Did he not call unto Noah? Did he not speak from the burning bush to Moses? Did he not appear to Paul on the road to Damascus?

“And now, in our day, the Lord has again stretched forth his hand. He has called a prophet—a humble boy named Joseph Smith. This boy knelt in a grove of trees in New York, seeking to know which church was true. And lo, a pillar of light descended, brighter than the noonday sun, and in that light stood the Father and the Son!”

The crowd thinned as the men continued to speak. My stomach growled, and I wished my parents would come back inside. But they only looked more engaged as the preachers droned on.

“‘Join none of them,’ the Lord said, ‘for they draw near with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’”

I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. A boy prophet had seen Jesus Christ? On the American continent? I had never heard of such things. As I pondered the words, I watched my father inch closer toward the ministers.

Suddenly, the crowd turned violent.

“Filthy Mormons!” someone spat.

“How many wives do yer Joseph Smith have?” yelled another.

Someone hurled an egg at the ministers. It hit one of their shoulders. A wet slap against his fine coat. My heart jumped to my throat, and I took an instinctive step backward. Shouts filled the courtyard.

And then someone threw a rock. I had never seen men inspire such rage. I ran inside. But my parents did not. I watched from our one small window as my father reached for the man and lightly grasped his arm with a hand that usually held a bottle of ale. Most of the crowd had scattered by now, but my parents and several others continued talking with the ministers.

Back in our dark, damp home—the entirety of which was smaller than our kitchen in Wiltshire—I finished peeling the potatoes. The sermon echoed in my mind. It was unlike anything I’d heard at parish churches before.

“There is a Holy Spirit ready to pour out temporal and eternal blessing upon you even at this time.”

I doubted it. By the age of twelve, I had learned not to expect blessings. I saw this entire encounter as little more than an entertainment to liven up my dull existence.

But I wondered what kept Mother and Father out there so long.

I put the potatoes on to boil and set three plates on the small round table. The rough pine surface was scarred by years of faint knife scores. The wood darkened by years of spilled broth and candle wax. I sat down on a chair that wobbled if you didn’t adjust your weight just so, cradled my head in my folded arms, and rested my eyes. Sleep came dear in these conditions.

My parents did not say much when they came in for supper. I was used to quiet meals, but this felt different. The silence was almost deafening, as if the words not being said were overtaking the room. I didn’t know what those missionaries had said to my parents in the courtyard, but whatever it was must have been deeply impactful. Something was happening inside of my home.

The next morning before the sun rose, my father prepared for his day at the docks. I heard the most peculiar sound. Something familiar from when I was a little girl. He was whistling.

How will this encounter affect Emmaline’s parents? How will it change Emmaline’s life? You can read the rest of Chapter Two when Emmaline is released in Spring 2026.

I understand the fascination. I grew up in the middle of it. My father is an excommunicated member, and many of my friends and extended family remain LDS. And I come from what Utahns would call “pioneer stock.” This is a story that shaped me because it is my own history and legacy.

In my research for Emmaline, I have consumed as much information about polygamy as I can, and I continue to do so. My work is centered on two things: Nineteenth Century polygamy in frontier Utah and the girls who were coerced into it, so I look particularly at work centered around those topics.

What troubles me is how often these stories center on everyone except the girls.

While documentation of these marriages exists, their stories are often left out of the narrative. Much of the fiction focuses on sisterhood, endurance, and frontier resilience. And while those things certainly existed, they were not the whole story. Many primary sources speak instead of loneliness, hunger, fear, isolation, and profound power imbalances within families.

When I talk with LDS friends in quieter, more honest moments, many will confide in me about that ancestor. The one everyone knows about but rarely names. The man who took a wife who was 14 or maybe 13. Often he was several decades older than she was. These stories are shared softly, almost apologetically, as if carrying a private shame passed down through generations.

I recently read a novel with a premise similar to Emmaline, but the heroine of that book was 17. I didn’t think too much of this until I read the author’s note and learned that the historical girl the heroine was inspired by was actually 14. I found myself wondering why the author chose to sanitize the truth. She kept the coercion part of the story, but brought the character to a more “palatable” age. Perhaps the author wanted to spare her family the shame. Perhaps the reality felt too unbearable to inhabit on the page. Perhaps she simply couldn’t face the emotional labor of writing that story about a girl of 14.

I see this very differently. When I hear about a 13- or 14-year-old coerced into polygamous marriage, I feel drawn to telling that story. I feel compelled to give her a voice.

I don’t see sisterhood, endurance, or frontier resilience. I see a childhood stolen and a voice silenced.

I see the fear and confusion of a 14-year-old being told what will happen on her wedding night (or maybe not warned ahead of time at all). I see the impossible imbalance of power between a child and a man decades her senior. I see the historical record of pregnancies and births, and I understand what that means—what had been done to her—while a first wife lay in the next room and tried to sleep.

Frontier resilience? No, let’s name the horror. This was not Little House on the Prairie with a sisterhood of wives living together and teaching the new 13-year-old bride how to make a quilt.

This was something far more brutal. This was Handmaid’s Tale.

I do not believe these stories should be softened to make them more palatable. I did not write Emmaline to put a pretty frame around an ugly history. I wrote it to give voice to a girl who was barely a teenager and who endured something that should never have been asked of her.

Official records are fragmented, and exact numbers are difficult to pin down. The church certainly has nothing to gain by making them available. Still, historians agree on several things: plural marriages involving girls as young as 13 did occur, and these girls were often pushed into them without their consent, sometimes by their own families. The historical record also shows that these marriages resulted in pregnancies.

Because nineteenth-century records so rarely preserve girls’ voices, we don’t often get to hear those stories. So as long as others keep sanitizing that history, I will work to bring it to light. Because those girls deserve a voice.

I never talked about William because he wasn’t so much a brother as he was a ghost, a shadow that covered my mother and father in grief during most of my childhood and, I supposed, rendered me nearly invisible to them.

I was so young during those years in Wiltshire, but I remember a doctor whispering about a fever, and neighbors saying things like, “Nothing they could do” and “So sudden,” as they dropped off stews and mincemeat pies. I think my mother sang before the darkness came. I think my father whistled. But my memories from that time are like dreams. I question the very ground beneath my feet when they come.

What I know for certain is that William’s absence reshaped everything that came after. It started immediately and didn’t stop, like water seeping through the cracks slowly and then all at once. With Father too grief-stricken and lost in drink to work dependably, the jobs stopped coming. And then so did everything else.

He had worked as a carter, hauling produce for farmers and merchants. But as time passed, his grief consumed him more, not less. I knew when I woke to the sounds of him stumbling through the house at night, I would likely not eat the next day.

I wondered if he knew that.

By the time we left Wiltshire for Liverpool in the spring of my twelfth year, William’s name seemed already forgotten in our home, if not our hearts. If I ever spoke it aloud, no one answered. He lies there still in Wiltshire—unvisited, I am sure. We have no people there.

We went to Liverpool because Father had been told there was good work at the docks. He found a home at the courts on Pembroke Place. It was to be a new start, and oh I had such excitement to move to a city where Father would have a steady income and there would be no ghost of William. But ghosts do not stay so easily where you leave them.

I had thought of Liverpool as something grand. A place of ships and trade and men in good hats and women in smart dresses. The kind of place where fortunes were made and dreams come true. But reality collides with your dreams quickly, even when you are twelve. I wasn’t prepared for the smoke, for the filth in the gutters, for the way the buildings closed in on each other, leaving no room for the sky.

My nose detected the court housing first. We rounded the corner, and an unending expanse of red brick tenement housing with slate roofs and muddy, cobbled roads came into view. It was awash in the scent of crowded, filthy bodies, coal smoke, seaweed from the docks, and—worst of all—the shared outdoor privies and chamber pots emptied into a communal ash pit. The smell stung my eyes, and I wiped a lone tear falling down my cheek.

“This is to be our home?” I asked.

Mother and Father did not answer. They just kept moving toward it. At first they didn’t notice that I wasn’t following. My feet were heavy. My legs wouldn’t move.

I ran ahead to them just before they got lost in the crowd, reaching for Father’s arm. He pulled me close and kissed my head.

Father was a good man, but a weak one. And a broken one. He drank to forget William, but in doing so, he forgot us too. He was not the type to get mean under the influence, not the type to rage. He was the kind who disappeared. In spirit first, then in body.

When he wasn’t drinking, he sometimes shared his dreams with me. “Emma,” he’d say—he was the only one who ever called me Emma. “Emma, things’ll be better in Liverpool. I can get good work at the docks. We’ll be startin’ fresh. There’s nothin’ but possibility when you start fresh.” He and I shared that kind of naive optimism in those days. And when he wasn’t drinking, there was a twinkle in his eye that made me believe him.

But this was not the Liverpool of our dreams. I tried telling myself that somewhere in this city was the promise Father spoke of. I trusted his dreams because I needed them to be true, not because I had reason to believe.

I understood my mother less than my father, even though I was almost always at her side. She was constant and steady. Always moving, always working.

She took pride in our home, even when we had almost nothing, cleaning and tidying our few possessions as if it made a difference. She never let herself be beaten down, but she never let herself soften either. It was only when I heard her quiet tears at night that I knew her heart was still broken. By William? By Father? By me? I didn’t know.

There were no tears in the mornings. She was industrious and pragmatic and spoke to me mostly about what needed doing.

“Tomorrow we’ll settle our home and talk to the merchants about taking in their mending. Always there’s mending to be done,” she said the day we arrived. “Your stitching’s coming along. You’re good enough to help now. We can double our pay.”

I understood that to mean I would not be going back to school, and I wanted to protest. But I didn’t have the courage. I almost never had the courage in those days. I nodded instead, eager to please her. To reach her. To break through her carefully built walls.

If I could know her, or she could know me, I thought I wouldn’t miss school so much. But I didn’t know how to break through.

Father, Mother, and I squeezed into one room, all of us, with only the pump in the courtyard for water. At night I could hear the groan of its handle as neighbors filled their pails in the dark. I heard the uneven, clomping footsteps of drunken men. I heard the cries of children, suffering from things I imagined, but couldn’t know.

Each night that first week, I curled up in my narrow cot and pulled the covers tightly around me, the thin fabric inadequate against the cold dampness of the dark room. I counted the sounds of the drip, drip, drip as rainwater fell into a bucket by the door. A drip for every minute I would not sleep.

I despaired at our circumstances and expected the darkness to settle upon us again, and it did, for a while. Work at the docks was not always guaranteed, even when Father was sober and eager to work.

Liverpool held the same sadness as Wiltshire, just covered in filth.

I had been right about not going back to school. This saddened me, but I knew it happened to many poor girls my age. Still, I was determined that I would not forget how to read. I was a good reader, earned the best marks in my class in Wiltshire, and reading was my only escape.

In the evenings after supper, I sat on my cot and brought out the four possessions beneath my narrow mattress: a copy of The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans that had once belonged to Mrs. Harcourt, a widow from our parish in Wiltshire who often lent me books and told me a girl should never be without poetry; a royal primer from the years I attended school; and a leather-bound journal and pen I received for my eleventh birthday. Father had carved “E. Kendall” into the leather. I couldn’t control much, but I would still find ways to read and write.

The journal was still blank. I wanted to have beautiful words for its lovely pages, but I was still waiting for the right thing to say. I dreamed of a life that might one day be worth recording. I didn’t know it then, but the events of the next five years would fill those journal pages.

In the meantime, I practiced my writing in the margins of my primer and on scraps of newspaper used to wrap fish or line our shelves, flattening them when no one was looking. I sounded out shop signs as we passed them, silently spelling each letter in my head. Liverpool would not take reading from me.

Mother and I walked the cobblestone streets early each morning to spend one or two shillings on food. She would send me to the baker’s for day-old bread while she haggled over the price of fish or mutton.

“I’ll not pay more than four pence, I won’t,” she’d tell the fishmonger before she walked away. He always called her back. Mother was something to watch. She did the best she could to feed us on our meager income.

After shopping, we worked on the mending, had tea and bread for lunch—with butter on the good days—and mostly stitched silently. What Mother thought about, I never knew, and that was my greatest sorrow.

Vegetables like carrots and cabbages were bought when Father had a full week’s wages. If he worked a whole fortnight, we might have tea, milk, butter, and even eggs. One morning at market, I watched a girl my age sink her teeth into a crisp apple. My mouth responded before I could stop it, watering as if I’d bitten it myself. It had been months since I felt the flesh of an apple on my own tongue. My mind wandered to a summer memory of Grandmother helping William and me pick all the apples we wanted from the trees in her garden. How I longed to taste that tartness or to feel the juice of an orange dribble down my chin.

Longing. That was what I knew best in the years since William’s death. Longing for food. Longing to be known. Longing to be enough for my parents.

Still, I held on.

Liverpool was not the first place to try to break me, and it would be far from the last.

If you enjoyed Chapter 1, stay tuned. EMMALINE will be released in Spring 2026.

October 19, 1856

Near present-day Casper, Wyoming

The Platte had been our lifeline for weeks. We’d followed the river all through Nebraska and into Wyoming. It was our source of water and our guide. We were alive because of the Platte.

But on the nineteenth of October—a day so bitterly cold that the winds bit straight through our bones—the river became our greatest foe.

It ran wide and swift, with ice chunks bobbing over the rough waters. The river cut straight across our path. We had to get to the other side. And the only way past it … was through it.

There was no bridge. No ferry. No choice.

I stood next to Gideon and watched the perilous river flow, our breath hanging like clouds as we spoke. “There has to be another way,” I said.

Then, with more urgency, “Don’t we have to turn back?”

“We can’t,” Gideon answered softly, bringing his trembling palms to his cheeks and drawing a deep breath. It was the first time I saw him scared. “If we go back, we’ll starve to death. Our only hope now is that the supply wagons will meet us on the other side of the river.”

I bet our family road trips are a lot like yours: carefully curated playlists (heavy on John Denver), audio books the whole family enjoys, a cooler full of ice and drinks, enough snacks to feed a small army, and a little squabbling over the air conditioner.

What we don’t do enough is look out the window and remember that we are not the first to travel this path. It is littered with bones of the ghosts who came before.

For hundreds of miles we are essentially riding the same corridor as the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails—sometimes within a mile of the original wagon ruts, sometimes directly on top of them. Writing Emmaline forced me to appreciate that drive in a whole new way. Our path, even through Missouri and Iowa, is eerily reminiscent of the one traveled by the Mormon pioneers.

Emmaline was part of the 1856 handcart migration, a plan by LDS Prophet Brigham Young to move thousands of European immigrants from Iowa City to Salt Lake City on foot. Yes, on foot. Many Americans don’t know that. Both the church and the immigrants were too poor to afford wagons for so many people, so the idea of pulling small wooden carts across the continent was hatched. Each person was allowed only 17 pounds of personal belongings, and many family heirlooms were sold or discarded.

Many LDS members today know The Handcart Song that the pioneers often sang as they traveled:

Ye saints who dwell on Europe’s shore
Prepare yourselves for many more
To leave behind your native land
For sure God’s judgments are at hand
For you must cross the raging main
Before the promised land you gain
And with the faithful make a start
To cross the plains with your handcart

The pioneers pushed and pulled their belongings on hastily made, poorly constructed, two-wheeled carts. The trip that takes my family two days, complete with a hotel bed and continental breakfast, took the handcart pioneers four months. I don’t have to tell you there were no hotel rooms or continental breakfasts. Their rations were inadequate to feed even a child, let alone an adult pulling a cart that weighed hundreds of pounds.

If you do the math on those four months, the handcart companies would need to leave Iowa City in June to reach the Salt Lake Valley by September and avoid early winter storms. In 1856, three handcart companies did just that and arrived without major tragedy.

Two did not.

Their handcarts were not ready when the emigrants arrived from England. They had to stay in Iowa City and build them themselves. These were the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies, each named for its respective leader. Emmaline was part of the Martin Company. Historian David Roberts calls their ordeal the deadliest tragedy in overland migration in his excellent book Devil’s Gate.

For the first two months they faced what all travelers along the Oregon Trail faced: buffalo stampedes, rattlesnake bites, thunderstorms without shelter, disease, and hunger. They buried bodies nearly every day.

Catastrophe on the trail

But on October 19, disaster truly struck.

An early winter storm caught them in Wyoming. Blizzard conditions. Subzero temperatures. An icy river that had to be forded on foot. And worst of all, no shelter. Hundreds died. It’s difficult to say exactly how many because records were either never kept or were later destroyed by church leaders.

Wagon trains from Salt Lake City met the company just in time to prevent hundreds more deaths from hypothermia and starvation. Many who survived faced amputations and lifelong health difficulties. The human toll was catastrophic.

For well over a century the church has focused on the hundreds who were saved rather than the hundreds who died, calling the handcart migration “a miracle.” And while lives saved are certainly worth celebrating, suffering deserves to be counted. Lost lives deserve to be honored. And the trauma of taking people from their homeland with promises of bounty and blessing, making them leave behind their possessions, coercing obedience with the promise of God’s protection, and sending them on a death march across the country is not a story that should be spun as a miracle. It was a preventable tragedy that killed hundreds, and caused many survivors lifelong trauma.

There’s a scene in my novel when Emmaline finally understands what she believes about all she has endured. I will partially excerpt it here. If the book has a thesis, this is it:

I knew there was beauty in nature and in people. I knew that whoever created these stars created me, too, and maybe even loved me. I didn’t know if I believed in God the way I used to, but I believed in goodness…

I also knew I was strong enough to walk away from what was wrong.

It was wrong to intentionally give others false hope. It was wrong to be careless with desperate people’s lives. It was wrong to threaten souls with the wrath of God in order to control them. And it was wrong to send 14-year old girls into the homes of married men in order to make them young plural brides.

These things I knew, and for now that was enough.

The next time we take that trip along I-80, we will stop to remember the ones who came before us, whose bones are scattered in the earth beneath our feet. We will mourn not just the lives they lost, but the lives that could have been. And I hope that Emmaline helps do that, too.

I don’t know where most novelists begin, but I started in the middle of Chapter 9. At the time, all I had was the historical framework for a character and an instinctive understanding of the ache she carried inside. So I opened the Notes app on my phone and typed a single sentence.

That was the moment Emmaline was born.

Only then was I ready to start at the beginning and find my way toward the place where those words lived on the page. What would she do with her fear?

That, as it turns out, is the rest of the book.