Books >
Keep Sweet

Keep Sweet
Keep Sweet
This edition: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Ages: 14 and up
Availability: Usually ships within 1 business day
List Price: $9.99
Your Price: $7.99 You Save $2.00 (20%)
Also available in

Awards and Nominations

  • ALA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers
  • ALA Quick Picks Nominee

Description

Alva Jane has never questioned her parents, never questioned her faith, never questioned her future. She is content with the strict rules that define her life in Pineridge, the walled community where she lives with her father, his seven wives, and her twenty-eight siblings. This is the only world Alva has ever known, and she has never thought to challenge it.

But everything changes when Alva is caught giving her long-time crush an innocent first kiss. Beaten, scorned, and now facing a forced marriage to a violent, fifty-year old man, Alva suddenly realizes how much she has to lose--and how impossible it will be to escape.

Read more:

Prologue

How did you come to write this book?

I started reading about the FLDS years ago and was stunned and outraged that young girls, American citizens in the U.S., are living in these communities where they have no control over their own lives. And that these groups operate openly, under the eye of law enforcement and our legal system....I still can't believe it! And since our government seems quite timid about actually going after these groups and putting an end to these illegal activities and human rights violations, I realized that it falls to the writers and the readers to make a change. I think it also opens up a lot of questions about self-determination, personal freedom, having choices and just being recognized as a whole human being with an intellect and a will and dreams....girls living in the FLDS are denied so many of those things and it's good to have a story open up our perspective on life. How it is and how it could be in different circumstances. And of course, I hope young readers want to get involved and help bring some positive change, to help the young people trapped in these communities. It will take young people speaking up, it always does!

Learn more about Michele Dominguez Greene
"Real elements of the FLDS experience add contemporary authenticity. Readers may simply relish the peek over the wall into a lifestyle very different from their own."  
-- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, April 2010
"Accessible and compelling."
-- School Library Journal, April 1, 2010