Excerpt from The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The farther we got from the center of town, the more spread out the neighborhood became. Eventually we walked past our neighbor's farm and reached the tall earthen banks of the reservoir. Five hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, the reservoir brought water to our irrigation ditches and those of the neighboring farms. Young willow trees lined its perimeter, and we could usually hear families of frogs croaking from its banks. It had been built as a community water supply, but it served as the colony swimming pool too. Adults and children came from all over to frolic and swim in the open-air tank, diving into it from a giant pipe that pumped freshwater from a deep well.

Our house was on the other side of the reservoir, at the end of a long gravel driveway. A tall barbed-wire fence surrounded my stepfather's property. Unlike some of the houses closer to town, ours didn't have any flowerbeds or a lawn. Mom was never able to get anything to grow. Except for her Volkswagen Microbus, which was usually broken and parked beside the kitchen door in the side yard, the house sat stark and solitary against the dry Mexican landscape.

An irrigation ditch of steadily flowing water ran along the front of our property. My stepfather had dug out the ditch at the beginning of our driveway so that it was wide and shallow enough for cars to drive through without wetting a car's engine. But when we weren't in a car, we had to leap across the ditch's narrow edge to get to our house.

Mom held my hand and we jumped across. As we landed on the opposite edge, clumps of wet earth crumbled underneath our feet and splashed into the running water.

When we got inside, Mom went to nurse my baby brother, Aaron. I pulled out my Disney coloring book and stubby crayons and made myself comfortable on the living room floor. Matt and Luke went out to play, while my older sister, Audrey, sat on the couch pulling at the cotton threads in her shirt, staring off into the distance, a quiet moaning sound coming from the back of her throat.

"Hush, Sis," Mom said, patting Audrey on the shoulder as she passed back through the living room. "Ruthie, come help me with these beans." I jumped up from the floor and hurried to Mom's side. She pulled a large gunnysack of pinto beans from the corner of our small, square kitchen. "It's important for you to learn how to cook. You'll need to know what to do when you're married and have your own kids." She spilled a pile of the speckled, brown beans onto the kitchen table. "When I married your dad, I didn't know how to make beans or anything else because my mom never showed me." I climbed up onto a chair and began imitating Mom's movements, carefully taking a small handful of pintos and spreading them out in front of me.

"How old were you when you and Dad got married?" I didn't much care for boys, but I knew that I would get married one day. Celebrations were an important part of life in LeBaron. We had lots of rodeos, horseback rides, campouts, bridal showers, baby showers, birthday parties, and Friday-night square-dance lessons at the church. But weddings were the most important.

"I was seventeen." Mom scanned the pile of beans from behind her thick glasses, shooing away the flies that had infested our kitchen. My siblings and I loved hearing the story about how, on one of my dad's mission trips to Utah, he climbed to the top of a mountain where he was visited by several resurrected prophets, including Jesus, Moses, and Joseph Smith. They told my father that he had been selected to lead a congregation with Colonia LeBaron as its Zion. Out of this visitation, Dad's church, the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times was born.

My father believed that polygamy was one of the most holy and important principles God ever gave His people. He preached that for a man to reach the Celestial Kingdom—the highest level of heaven—he had to have at least two wives. If a man lived this principle, he would become a god himself and inherit an earth of his own, one just like our earth. Women who married polygamists, loved their sister wives, and had as many children as they could would become goddesses, which meant that they were their husband's heavenly servants. Salvation came from freeing oneself and others from the moral turpitude of Babylon. My dad had visions in which God foretold the destruction of the United States, which my dad believed was a modern Babylon. That's why he ended up doing much of his missionary work in the Babylon among Babylons: Las Vegas. That was was where he first noticed my mom.

Excerpted from The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner. Copyright © 2016 by Ruth Wariner. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.