Two and a half years ago, BCC Press made the world a better place when we published the first volumes of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These and The Women’s Book of Mormon. You responded by buying them in massive quantities of these volumes and making them two of our bestselling books of all time. And now we are about to do it again with a pair of volume twos.
There is nothing in the world quite like The Book of Mormon for the Least of These. This is because there is no one in the world anything like Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming—the two brilliant women whose lives and experienced have prepared them for the brilliant analysis at the heart of these books. The Book of Mormon for the Least of These offers patient, verse-by-verse close readings of a scriptural driven by a passion for justice and a rejection of the idea that racism, sexism, inequality, and violence can ever be seen as the work of God.
The second volume of a projected trilogy brings the authors’ trademarked analysis to bear on the books of Mosiah and Alma—two of the longest books in the Book of Mormon and two of the most violent. Here we see the authors’ response to the magnificent final speech of King Benjamin, the trial and execution of Abinadi, the baptismal covenants set forth at the Waters of Mormon, the trials of Nehor and Korihor, the wars with the Amlicites and the Amalickiahites, and the horrific burning of innocent women and children in Ammonihah. Salleh and Hemming deal with these texts directly, and they show us how to read them ethically—as records of God supporting equality and justice and condemning war, brutality, inequality, and injustice. Take a look at their reading of the first four chapters of Mosiah, including King benjamin’s speech, right here:
Mette Harrison’s Women’s Book of Mormon does much of the same work that The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, but it does the work as a novel, which means that the author is free to create stories, characters, plotlines, and narrative arcs that are not in (but definitely implied by) the Book of Mormon text. In many ways, Harrison, one of the Mormon world’s most talented and accomplished novelists, addresses one of the biggest problems that the Book of Mormon has for modern readers, which is that the women’s viewpoint is completely absent. But not for Mette Harrison; she invents the stories of the women whom nobody talks about in the male-dominated text.
This is Harrison’s fourth novelization from the Book of Mormon published with BCC Press. In each of these volumes, she imagines how the story would be different if the excluded voices were included. And, in doing so, she speaks to what is silenced, but not entirely excised from the text. In The Book of Laman, she imagines what Nephi is not saying in his story, and she shows the redemption of a character that is much more consistent with the Book of Mormon’s own theology than the story that we actually see in the text. In The Book of Abish, she imagines the story of a minor character in the Book of Mormon who is also one of only three female characters in the text with a name.
In the Woman’s Book of Mormon. all of the women get names—21 of them in volume 2 alone, including: Dara, the mother of Samuel the Lamanite, who prepares her son for a great work that she does not understand; Kishla, the daughter of Kishkumen, who knows that her father is a public enemy but also knows that he loves her; and Shila, the Nephite mother, who devotes her life to burrying the dead—both Nephite and Lamanite—after a great battle in which her husbands and four sons were killed. And, of course, Isabel, the courtesan who has been vilified for generations for tempting Corianton away from his missionary duties. See her story below
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
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