Set in the Post-Mormon community of New Cumorah on the dry shores of what was once the Great Salt Lake, MATRIARCHY centers on sisters Delta and Theta Holloway, the former a Translator of criminal thought-data, the latter the city’s official Matriarch. When Theta’s youngest son attempts an assassination of the Prophet and Patriarch of New Cumorah, Delta will become an intimate witness to her sister’s fall from power as Theta is forced to face head-on the condition of this new female-headed rule: that any son entering the world through a woman would forever be her burden—his sin, her sin; his punishment, her punishment. As Theta is forced to choose between taking her son’s life or facing death herself, Delta considers the history that led the women of New Cumorah to this bargain: how a global infertility epidemic and subsequent girl-boom suddenly saw a ten-to-one female-to-male ratio in the world’s population; how this shift fomented a quiet transfer of power from the old, male-dominated tradition to the newly divided society of Matriarchal government and Patriarchal religion; and how her sister’s imminent fall from power threatens to bring old secrets back to light.
Tracing the faultlines of a divided world that mirrors our own, MATRIARCHY fixes its attention on the paradoxes of power and the hypocrisies of tradition. As an appraisal of religion as a cultural (and personal) impetus toward prejudice, MATRIARCHY considers what happens when our closest bonds become a source of distrust, in ourselves and in others.
Goddfrey Hammit. 