The Bishop's Wife (Mette Ivie Harrison)

3/5. Okay. So. I thought I was going to adore this book. Then I read the first chapter. Then I thought I was going to hate and despise this book. Then I read the rest of it and decided it was okay. Its principal problem is that it's not the book I wanted it to be, which isn't its fault; a related secondary problem is that it doesn't fully engage with its (LDS) environment, which may not be the author's fault (more on that on a bit) but which I think is a flaw in the book. It's also got some other subsidiary flaws.

The book I wanted was a mystery-sleuth-esque version of Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys, which as far as I'm concerned is the book describing what it is like to be a practicing LDS living in an LDS ward. I don't know of any other book that does it nearly as well. What I wanted was for this book to do for LDS women what Lost Boys did for LDS wards as a whole: show the fabric of the cross-connections, the friendships (the feuds, for that matter), the acts of service and love binding together the women of the ward (and, heck, the acts of pettiness and obnoxiousness, and how they're dealt with) -- which is THE thing that I find most wonderful and valuable about the LDS church -- and use that as a jumping-off point to solve the mystery.

The book I got was a mystery that sort of tangentially took place in a space created by a religion that was similar to but utterly unlike the LDS Church I know, with almost nothing in the way of cross-connections between women (heck, it only barely passes Bechdel), no sense of that fabric binding the ward as a whole. Linda, the main character and titular Bishop's Wife, is some sort of brave soul all by her lonesome forging those interpersonal connections one agonizing link by link by bringing baked goods and for the first time opening up to other people who open up to her because she is The Bishop's Wife.

( Baked goods, hierarchical inaccuracies, Miss Marple, Heroine Validation. )

Lost Boys (Card)

5/5. So I was sufficiently disappointed in The Bishop's Wife that I started reading bits and pieces of Lost Boys to compare, and I ended up snarfing almost the entire thing down — all the bits that referenced the LDS church, in any case.

This is a book I can't think rationally about at all, so, you know, I love it very very much and you'll just have to take that with all the grains of salt in the world. It's a formative book for me. I read it first in high school, when I had no idea about anything involving marriage and kids, and it has informed the way I think about relationships and families in a deep way. Like, there's a passage where Card — I mean, Step Fletcher, the narrator, although you can tell this is a book where the characters are deeply identified with Card and his family, where the pain of the characters is pain from Card's own life that has been transformed and transmuted (compare e.g. a lot of his early work, where he just enjoyed torturing characters just because) —

( Cut for length: Marriage. Kids. Church. Writing and the ward prophetess. )

Also, you know, for this book: basically all the trigger warnings IN THE WORLD. Seriously, if you have any triggers (including bugs) I would not recommend reading this, at least not without talking to me first. And the whole thing makes me bawl. I mean, on rereads I can barely get through a chapter of it without bawling (partially because the themes of the ending are shot through the entire book).

But if you want a primer to LDS life, to what it's like to live as an LDS family in an LDS ward, I can think of no better, more heartfelt, or more true example than this book.