Dreaming Out Loud — Michelle Roth

What if you dreamed since your childhood of a man you've never met, believing you would marry him someday? What if he actually arrives, exactly as you imagined, but he is a polygamist? Painfully shy Sarah is 40 years old and recovering from cancer that left her unable to bear children. After she accepts her dream man as a mere fantasy, Jacob appears in her small, gossip-filled Wisconsin town. When Sarah falls in love with Jacob, he informs her that he already has two wives and eight children. He asks Sarah to come to Utah and be his third wife, offering her the family she cannot create on her own. Sarah has spent her life running her father's business and helping raise her sister Megan's children. She decides to follow her own heart for once and leaps head first into polygamy. The choice is filled with concessions and battles Sarah is not prepared to face. Sarah's greatest allies and critics on her journey are her sister Megan, a single mother struggling to raise her children in poverty, and their 82-year-old surrogate mother, Lilly, who left the south in the 1950's in search of a home where her interracial marriage would be permitted. Told in first person, Dreaming Out Loud follows each woman through her own little reality, witnessing the upheaval as she changes the definitions of marriage and family. Sarah, Lilly and Megan show us that we all carry the same struggles, the same weights of womanhood and motherhood, merely in different names and forms.