Keep Sweet

The water belongs to the Lord. So do the wives.

Every morning at six, the box on the kitchen wall plays the Charge: obey the Prophet, keep sweet, and never murmur at the cup. Outside the Hedge lies ash. Inside is Zion, and Zion is running dry.

Merit Barlow is the third wife in a lower-valley house of lavender dresses, rationed taps and two small graves behind the chicken run. She can read better than any girl the schoolhouse ever taught, which is a sin, and she can look sweet while she thinks, which is a skill. She still believes. Mostly.

Then her husband asks one question about the drought figures at priesthood meeting, and in a single morning his wives are scattered to other men. Merit is placed with Bishop Nathan Steed: soft-voiced, beautifully spoken, the Prophet's own nephew, and the man who writes the Lord's revelations in his locked study.

He wants a wife who can read. He gives her his ledgers to copy.

And in the ledgers Merit finds the truth the Twelve have kept for twenty years: two lines of water run through the valley, one clean and one poisoned, and someone decides which houses drink from which. The valve keeper, a quiet man who asks her what she thinks, shows her the brimming reservoir. The drought is a lie. The babies were never God's judgment.

Now Merit has a choice no sweet girl is supposed to make: keep the peace that is killing the lower valley, or turn the wheels herself.

Keep Sweet is the first book of a literary dystopian trilogy about faith, obedience and the women who learn to count for themselves.

Reader note: an adult dystopian novel inspired by real high-control polygamous communities. It depicts coercive marriage, pregnancy loss and religious abuse. There is no explicit sexual content, and violence is kept offstage.

★ A walled valley where the water is rationed and the wives are assigned ★ A third wife who still half believes ★ The ledgers that prove the drought is a lie ★ A valve keeper who asks what she thinks ★ A soft-voiced bishop who writes God's words ★ The first choice she has ever made ★