Unless you’ve been living some kind of Outlander existence for the last 50 years, you might have caught on that Mormons are big on families. Traditional ones. One mom. One dad. Some children. Some people — inside the church, actually — wish we’d shut up about it. We won’t. We don’t think we can afford to. While speaking up may be our strength, I don’t [...]
I’m not sure how Katherine Hayton’s The Three Deaths of Magdalene Lynton ended up on my Kindle. But I gave it a whirl. It’s a workable murder mystery in which we have two detectives, Ngaire and Deb, possibly meant to be the Cagney & Lacey of Christchurch, New Zealand. A man walks in off the street and confesses to a forty-years-past murder. He’s got nothing to [...]
Let me tell you about a difficult parenting moment: I subscribe to Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. I enjoy its frank discussions about Mormon history, it’s ponderings on what is doctrine and what is culture, its book reviews, its short stories. Heck, I’ve published stories in Dialogue. It’s my duty to support this little journal. One day back when we had teenagers, I picked [...]
Well, we all know that you’re a mom of three enviable children. Or a nurse. Or a grad student with a super-interesting major. But maybe you’re tired of everybody thinking that’s all you’re about. You wish we'd sit beside you a little longer and ask more questions. Then you could admit that you played accordion in a family band. (Or maybe you don’t want us to know about [...]
How well do you know your mother at age 25? At age 16? How about age 12? I already knew about my mother’s other boyfriend, the one whose attentions ran a close race with my dad.. The surprises were the trips and camps she did during her college summers. Imagine the surprise of author Jazmin Darznik when a picture of her mother fell into her [...]
At the request of a faithful reader, today I unveil my top-10 fiction list. And what does it take to make the list? A) The book has to be memorable. I read enough books that they almost whiz by like highway signs. Not all of them stick with me. Ah, but the ones that do, they’re like great road trips that I wish I could [...]
This was the black sheep of my family. Take a guess at her most heinous crime: 1) eloped to Reno 2) smoked unfiltered cigarettes 3) stayed up long after the TV stations signed off for the night. The correct answer is: 3. Sister Black-Sheep was actually a pretty good girl. No elopements. No cigarettes. But her sleep habits? Yeah, a real stain on her character. [...]
Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is an almost idyllic story in spite of the fact that the characters have just survived the war in a no-name country that sounds like Yugoslavia. In this post-war world, Natalia, a female doctor, adjusts to the new normal — orphans, tuberculosis, shortages just starting to let up, cities that used to belong to “us” and now they belong to [...]
I stepped outside my usual bailiwick this week and read a middle-grade fantasy novel. In The Warble by Victoria Simcox, (I received a free copy for review purposes) young Kristina comes home from her last day of the school year with a gift from her teacher. It’s a non-descript silver ball, hardly worth the giftwrap. But then it buzzes at night, waking Kristina up. This [...]
By show of hands, how many of you have already read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Everybody who grew up before cable TV? Everybody but me? The copy I so recently procured for myself proved, upon opening, to be an illustrated edition of the classic story. I’ve endured snickers and smirks from members of my household. “What have we here? Is that the full [...]
