The Giant Joshua – Chapter 17: The Great Smile and the Sequel

From the Maurine Whipple Collection, Brigham Young University
Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections

Thank you for sticking with us this last two months! We end with a discussion of the final, 17th chapter, followed by the story of Maurine’s efforts at producing a sequel, and a synopsis of the sequel. We are excited to say that five excellent completed chapters, along with other lost works of Maurine’s, will soon be published.

A public Zoom event will be held on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua and Maurine Whipple. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. It will last 90 minutes. Anyone interested in Mormon literature or Mormon history is invited to attend and participate.

Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85698612887
Meeting ID: 856 9861 2887

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The Giant Joshua, Chapters 15 and 16: Polygamy raids, life on the underground, and the real-life stories behind the novel

Portrait of Mormon polygamists in prison, at the Utah Penitentiary, circa 1889. Photo by Charles Roscoe Savage/Harold B. Lee Library/Creative Commons

By Andrew Hall

We are nearing the end of this monumental novel, with only the final, 17th chapter to cover next week. As we previously announced, we will hold a Zoom event on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. Lynne Larson and I, who have been writing these weekly posts, will also attend. All who have read or are reading the novel are invited to attend and participate.

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Fall is the time for a Bountiful Harvest from BCC Press

Christian Harrison and Jon Forsyth brought art and design together for the cover.

We’re just days away from stepping into fall, and here at BCC Press we promise you books that are ripe for the picking — get ready to gather them all. 

The first of our autumnal offerings is Charity Shumway’s latest book, Bountiful. It’s a warm, funny, and perceptive family novel about the complex relationships between parents and their adult children, and the ongoing negotiations required to maintain a place in a beloved community. 

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The Giant Joshua, Chapters 11-12: Polygamy and Postmemory

by Sarah C. Reed

Inside the St. George Tabernacle

“Hell ain’t got no terrors for me after Dixie!” (The Giant Joshua, 406)

Summary
These two chapters see tribulations continue to come to our main characters, but with opportunities for happiness and reconciliation. With the plague of the black canker passed, taking many children, including Clory’s three, Erastus Snow calls a meeting to reassure the saints. He asks them to remember their trials with sickness in Nauvoo and Winter Quarters. Some would like to leave, but Erastus shames them as cowards lacking faith and promises things will improve.

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The Giant Joshua — Chapters Nine and Ten

By Lynne Larson

“That was it, she thought, that which would sustain her . . . the Light was still hers, growing brighter as one gained wisdom . . . The wave of joy broke, and the dazzling spray flooded her with love, faith, divine goodness.”

It is soul-piercing grief that haunts these hundred pages – Chapters Nine and Ten – and unfathomable loss of her beloved Freeborn and her three children that points Clory toward the maturity of spirit required to recognize the “Light” of the above quotation and survive her circumstances. The ultimate victory will be hard-won.

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Maurine Whipple and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: A complicated relationship (Chapters 7 and 8)

by Andrew Hall

Maurine Whipple and Hyrum Lee, 1927. The two dated while Maurine worked as a teacher in Monroe, Utah. 

I’ll start today’s post with brief review of the themes in Chapters Seven and Eight, and then spend the majority of the post on a discussion of Maurine Whipple’s lifetime relationship with the Church.

Themes of Chapters Seven and Eight

These chapters are long and full of interesting stories, incidents, and conversations. There is little of the descriptions of the natural environment or introspective passages found in the previous chapters.

The chapters feature Willie and Clory’s pregnancies and births. Willie’s baby is stillborn. Clory is shocked that not only does Abijah refuse to call a doctor (to show faith) but Bathsheba, a trained midwife, refuses to help because she thinks it is too early. She is wrong, and only Clory is there to help her with the birth. Clory, in her anger, foolishly gives Bathsheba the right to raise her unborn child. After she successfully gives birth to her daughter, Kissy, she scares the superstitious Bathsheba off by claiming she had placed a hex on the baby. Clory is enraptured with her baby, and feels the increased power it gives her in the family.

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The Giant Joshua – Chapters Five and Six: Community unity and Native Americans

By Lynne Larson      

“You couldn’t whip the desert without togetherness. The Group Faith — the ability to live outside oneself, to sacrifice oneself for the Common Good. Some day they would be strong enough to afford dissenters — now salvation lay only in complete and disciplined togetherness. Except ye are one, ye are not mine . . . You had to be ruthless to colonize.”

As Chapter Five of The Giant Joshua begins, the relentless rain has eased, but the storm, and with it the swelling of the Virgin River, has struck at the hearts of the people and reminded them that they must stand together to survive, united in their faith and in their willingness to follow strict injunctions. Food supplies have been reduced to a “grim measure.” Sickness has run riot through the camp, and ‘Sheba fears that the burial clothes will mold before she can get a lifeless body ready for the grave.

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The Giant Joshua, Chapters Three and Four

By Andrew Hall

These chapters present a microcosm of several themes and conflicts found in the novel, including stirring depictions of the faith that led the pioneer Saints to make such enormous sacrifices in their mission of building a Zion society. Here too, we see some of the less appealing aspects of the colonizing generation—its fear and cruelty towards Native Americans, its child marriages, and the heartbreak that could result from plural marriage.

St. George pioneers and the tragic price of faith
Chapter Three opens with the Saints having just arrived in what would become St. George in 1861. Whipple provides a geographic description by having Apostle Erastus Snow, the real-life leader of the Cotton Mission, observe the valley from the Sugar Loaf, a high steep rock in the red cliffs to the north. At this point, he sees his people still living in their tents and wagons, but he will return often to that spot as the settlement grows, and the Sugar Loaf becomes a landmark for the town.

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The Giant Joshua – Chapters One and Two

By Lynne Larson

White and crimson, or black and yellow and blue — behind her and ahead and around her — spewed in fantastic violence, in every shade and nuance, the colors of this unreal landscape glittered with such intensity that she closed her eyes and for a moment her breath clung to her throat. She felt hemmed in with untamed, imponderable forces . . . between the two black ridges lay the valley of sagebrush where she was going to spend the rest of her life — the valley that was already named, President Young had told them, the city of St. George. (The Giant Joshua, p. 3-4)

            As Maurine Whipple’s heroine, Clorinda MacIntyre is vividly presented with her new home in the first pages of The Giant Joshua, we as readers are introduced to “Clory” herself, and we meet a dozen other sharply-drawn characters as well. We will come to intimately know them all as we turn the pages of  the novel. There is bearded, rigid Abijah, with his Scottish brogue, the strict family patriarch, whom the teenaged Clory has recently married. At this point, he is still ‘Uncle Abijah’ to her, since the marriage has not yet been consummated, an event she is anticipating with both apprehension and girlish curiosity. There are Bathsheba and Wilhelmina, Abijah’s other wives, the former mean-spirited, imperious, and superstitious, with a prominent wart on her jutting chin, the latter soft, shy, easily subdued, and surely Bathsheba’s foil. With these are Abijah’s sons, including Freeborn, enraptured with pretty Clory, as any teenaged boy might be. The band of pioneers includes cheery Lon Tuckett, a tailor who loves to sing and quote original verse through all his hardships, and his very pregnant German immigrant wife Betsy. Also the Hichinopers, a happy couple so worried about their firstborn baby, they carry it up hill and down on a pillow, lest it ever feel neglected. They and the others make up a caravan of Saints sent by Brigham Young to establish the Cotton Mission in southern Utah’s Dixie.

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BCC Late Summer Book Club: The Giant Joshua

By Andrew Hall and Lynne Larson

Welcome to the BCC Late Summer Book Club!

For the next eight weeks we will be reading Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, which is widely considered to be Mormonism’s greatest novel. Maurine Whipple is an enigmatic figure—in 1938 at age 35 she was broke, divorced and depressed, a failed grade school teacher who wrote obsessively but who had never published a substantial work. In that year, however, she was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for new writers, and the coveted prize allowed her to take pen in hand, let her genius flower, and create her masterpiece. Over the next two years she worked feverishly on The Giant Joshua, the epic story of the 1861 settlers of St. George. 

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Another BCC Press Sunstone Sale–All Ebooks $4.99. Are we nuts?

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In case you missed the memo, BCC Press has developed a new web site and unveiled it at this year’s all-online Sunstone Sumposium. You have already seen Bob Rees’s book that we launched today as part of this grand unveiling. By Common Consent. And you know that we are selling all books by Sunstone Symposium speakers for 25% off.

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BCC Press Is Thrilled to Announce: A New Book by Bob Rees

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By Common Consent is thrilled to announce our newest book–and our fourth book of the year to celebrate and examine the Book of Mormon. We lead off the first half of the year with The Book of Mormon for the Least of These by Fatimeh Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming, which has gone on to become our of the top-selling volumes in BCC Press history. We also published Mette Harrison’s book The Women’s Book of Mormon and Michael Austin’s Buried Treasures. We are proud to announce the capstone of our Year of the Book of Mormon with Robert A. Rees’s A New Witness to the World. (Kindle version here).

A New Witness to the World, which has been years in the making, contains thirteen essays by one of Mormonism’s most distinguished scholars. Bob Rees has been active in Mormon Studies for nearly sixty years. He was one of the Founding Parents of Dialogue and the journal’s second editor. During all of this time, Bob has been studying both the Book of Mormon and the religion it created, andd he has done so with the fine eye of a literary critic and the precision of an expert scholar.

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Melody and Twila (and peggy)–How Lucky We Are to Be Alive Right Now

By now the whole world knows that the Schuyler Sisters were the hottest—and coolest—female siblings in America. The operative word here is “were,” since, as of today, we have a new reigning matriarchy–the Newey Sisters. Today, By Common Consent Press is pleased to announce the publication of An Imperfect Roundness by Melody Newey Johnson, and Sylvia by Twila Newey. How lucky we are to be alive right now. And wait ’till you get a load of Peggy.

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Free Audio Chapters for Your Book of Mormon Study

Yesterday, we let the cat out of the bag about our evil plan to flood the world with excellent, reasonably priced audiobooks of our best titles. And, like we always say, when the cat is out of the bag, you might as well listen to the meows. (OK,we’ve never actually said this until today, but you know what we mean).

Anyway, we have more audiobooks on the way, but the approval process at ACX/Audible/Amazon is so darn long that we don’t have more than one to show for the effort. We would like to give you a wealth of listening pleasures during the Coronapocalypse (Coronageddon? Covid-Nineteen-Ninety-Nine?). And (we just realized), we have the files. If we can’t find a way to sell them to you, we can GIVE them to you.

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A Little Light from BCC Press: A New Audiobook and a Free Kindle Surprise

The world is getting used to a new normal, and BCC wants to help. We have some exciting announcements coming up, but today we want to unveil a new direction for the most amazing little press in the Mormon Universe.

We now do audiobooks.

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Book Review: The Book of Mormon for the Least of These

by Nancy Ross

Editor’s note: This review of our most recent BCC Press book, The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, was published yesterday on the Exponent II Blog. Normally we wold just link to it, but we liked it so much we asked if we could cross post it to BCC.  

Abstract book cover for the book "The Book of Mormon For the Least of These: 1 Nephi - Word of Mormon by Fatimah Salleh with Margaret Olsen Hemming."
The Book of Mormon For the Least of These: 1 Nephi – Word of Mormon by Fatimah Salleh with Margaret Olsen Hemming

I devoted a good chunk of my life to reading and re-reading the Book of Mormon. My preferred method in my adult life was to read it very quickly, following a schedule I’d worked out when President Gordon B. Hinckley issued his challenge for LDS church members to read the book in 100 days. I enjoyed my Book of Mormon binge reads and the text grew with me as I worked my way through the church milestones of adult life.

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Introducing The Book of Mormon for the Least of These

Today, BCC Press is tickled pinkish to be launching The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, by Fatimah Salleh with Margaret Olsen Hemming. This is a downright remarkable book of learned theology, active reading, social justice, and, above all, deep fatih. The following post is by the authors.

The strength and beauty of a holy text is that it can be read again and again, with different and new understandings and insights revealed every time. A holy text is not exhausted by a single interpretation; it compels readers to return and review, reexamine, and reinterpret. The Bible has withstood millenia of innumberable methods of understanding: orthodox, liberal, academic, literary, feminist, etc. The Book of Mormon has certainly experienced readers examining it from various points of view, including through history, literature, and orthodoxy. But a close reading of the complete book as scripture that has messages about oppression, inequality, and other issues of social justice has not been available until now. This book, the first in a trilogy, is a social justice exegesis of the first third of the Book of Mormon, from 1 Nephi to the Words of Mormon.

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What to Do with that Embarassing Mistake in the Manual? Try BCC Press

You have probably heard by now that the printed edition of this year’s Come Follow Me manual contains an embarassing, and controversial error that, Peggy Fletcher Stack reports in a recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune, “could set back progress that the Utah-basesd faith has made on the issue of racism in the past few years–and alienate people of color.”

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The Women’s Book of Mormon Is Here

Papereback 9.99 Kindle $6.99

We have been busy little deseret here at BCC Press in January. For ther unitiated, deseret is a Jaredite term for “honeybee.” The Jaredites, of course, came to the New World before the languages were confounded at the Tower of Babel, so they spoke a pure Adamic tongue. As near as we can tell, deseret is what God calls bees.

There are all sorts of fantastic beasts in the Book of Mormon. Along with honeybees, there are horses, and cows and oxen and asses and goats. And, of course, the mysterioius curelom and cumom. In all, the official LDS Coloring Book Curriculum lists 17 different animals that are named in the Book of Mormon.

Yes, there are lots of animals named in the Book of Mormon. What there aren’t a lot of are named women. There are, in fact, four women named in the entire book: Sariah, the wife of Lehi; Abish, the Lamanite servant; Isabel, the harlot and, by prophecy and reputation only, Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ. This is not enough for the Book of Mormon itself to even sit for the Bechdel Test, much less pass it.

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January Is Book of Mormon Month at BCC Press

Here at BCC Press, we are starting our fourth year with a bang. Well, not literally with a bang. But, literally, with three new books desgined to complement the Come Follow Me Book of Mormon curriculum this year. Our offeringts are varied across generes and rhetorical modes, but they are united in their purpose to help you see and appreciate a familiar book in new and exciting ways.

We will be releasing one new book a week–today, next Friday, and the Friday after that so that, by the end of the month, you can line them all up on your shelf and nod with satisfaction that you are ready for the year.

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Merry Christmas from BCC Press

Here at BCC Press, we want no part of the War on Christmas. We love Christmas. We love it so much that we have marked down nearly all of our 2019 line of books by 40%. From now until the end of the year (in case you have Christmas money that you need to spend), you can get any or all of the following books for a price that is closer to free than it is to any other book of the same great quality and value.

Marked down from $12.95 to $7.77

bruder plunge
   
name-1 leere
   

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Prophecy and Poetry–and Two New Books from BCC Press

twofer

At BCC Press, we believe that the line between poetry and prophecy is vanishingly thin and not really a line at all. Nearly all of the prophets in the Bible were also poets. Read correctly, the magnificent verses of Isaiah, the profound Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the stunning rebukes of Amos and Hosea are among the ancient world’s greatest poems.

The reverse is true as well: the poets of a culture are invariably its greatest prophets. Whether it is William Blake reconciling contraries through prophetic verse, or William Butler Yeats organizing history into self-annihilating gyres, or Walt Whitman telling Americans on the eve of the Civil War that “affection shall solve the problems of freedom”–poets warn us, challenge us, and reveal new and startling truths that complicate our lives. [Read more…]

Your Earth Day Present from BCC Press: The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals, by Steven L. Peck

Two years and two weeks ago, on April 6, 2017, BCC Press began with a single book: Steven Peck’s Science the Key to Theology. Today, we are proud to announce the publication of our 21st book, also by Steven Peck: The Tragedy of King Leere, the Goatherd of the La Sals.

In a certain (very metaphorical) sense, BCC Press is now a Steve Peck sandwich. We have a varied and tantalizing selection of fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir, and Steve is the artisan bread that holds it all together and gives it a shape. Science the Key to Theology is a serious work of philosophical nonfiction with the potential to change the way that Latter-day Saints see the universe. King Leere, on the other hand, is a post-modern, post-climate-change, post-American novel set in Southern Utah among people who used to be Mormons.

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“I Gave Her a Name”

Rachel Hunt Steeblik is the author of I Gave Her a Name, her second collection of poems about Heavenly Mother. Her first collection, Mother’s Milk, won the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Poetry in 2018. Both books are published by BCC Press. Rachel will be reading selections from I Gave Her a Name tonight at Anthony’s Fine Art and Antiques in Salt Lake City and tomorrow night at Writ & Vision in Provo. Both readings start at 7:00 PM.

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I very purposefully set Mother’s Milk inside two prayers, an invocation and a benediction, and as a prayer. I did it because I love Joanna Brooks’ poem called “Invocation/Benediction,” that addresses “Father, Mother”, and because before Jeffrey R. Holland’s 2015 conference talk, “Behold Thy Mother,” that explicitly thanked “a Mother in heaven” (along with Mother Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Mary of Nazareth) for Her “crucial role in fulfilling the purposes of eternity,” the last non “heavenly parents” reference to Heavenly Mother in General Conference was Gordon B. Hinckley’s 1991 talk, “Daughters of God,” that suggested that those who pray to Heavenly Mother are “well-meaning, but…misguided.” I wanted to offer my own language of how we might pray about Heavenly Mother or simply to feel closer to Her.

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Presenting “I Gave Her a Name” and “A New Constellation”

 

 

We have a different version of the pride cycle here at BCC Press: we publish something great and feel proud of it, and then we publish something even better and feel proud about that too. And then we remember all of the other great stuff we published and become so justifiably proud that we have to stay in our rooms for a few days so we don’t go into stores and other random places and start sounding like Robert Goulet in Camelot.

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Speaking Mormon

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Keira Shae is the author of the phenomenal BCC Press megahit How the Light Gets In, a memoir of her early life in the dark underbelly of Provo, Utah. She was taken from a Meth-house to an LDS foster home as a teen. She will be joining fellow BCC authors Ashley May Hoiland, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Keira Shae this weekend for readings at Anthony’s Antiques & Fine Art in Salt Lake City (7:00 PM on Friday, April 5) and Writ & Vision in Provo (7:00 PM on Saturday, April 6). Her story, and her book, are featured in the April 3 Edition of the Deseret News.


I speak Mormon.

People ask me all the time for “proof” of my standing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons and ex-Mormons alike will question my garment-wearing habits or Sunday routine, an “in-group” or “out-group” marker.

These are still tribes sticking to hard and fast rules. I did it, too. And do. It’s a way to gauge your interaction with others and adjust to their knowledge or preferences.

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Higher Law Mormons

Mette Harrison, the author of this guest post, is a frequent contributor to BCC and the author of three books for BCC Press, most recently, The Book of Abish. She will be joining fellow BCC authors Ashley May Hoiland, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Keira Shae this weekend for readings at Anthony’s Antiques & Fine Art in Salt Lake City (7:00 PM on Friday, April 5) and Writ & Vision in Provo (7:00 PM on Saturday, April 6).

Since I heard from my own mother (who is ninety years old) about General Conference rumors that the Word of Wisdom would allow coffee and tea consumption, I was inspired to write this essay.

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Taking the Plunge for All It Is Worth (Which Is a Lot)

BCC welcomes this guest review by Roger Terry, editorial director at BYU Studies and the author of Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary, published in 2019 by BCC Press.

BCC Press has recently released two missionary memoirs, and Michael and Steve thought it would be fun to have the two authors review each other’s book. In my own memoir, I made the following observation up front: “One thing you need to know is that in spite of the stultifying sameness of dress imposed upon male Mormon missionaries (females get cut a little slack in this department), no two missionaries are alike. Beyond this, there is another level of diversity: between missions. . . . My youngest son recently returned from serving in Ukraine. At the same time, his cousin was serving in Florida.

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Representation Matters: Naming Women in the Book of Mormon

This guest post is by Mette Harrison, whose many books include The Book of Abish, which was published this week by BCC Press.

A male friend of mine asked me a few years ago, when I complained about how few women spoke at General Conference, why it mattered to me. “If you believe the message is from God, then surely it’s the same message no matter who gives it.” This is, in a nutshell, what I think many men believe about male leadership within the Mormon church, and to be honest, about male leadership at work, in government, and in the media.

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The Book of Abish Is Here


As BCC has already proved with math, the Book of Mormon does not pass the Bechdel Test. In fact, it doesn’t even qualify to sit for the Bechdel Test. It doesn’t have two named female characters who talk to each other about anything. It doesn’t even have two named female characters who are alive at the same time or part of the same story. Only three women in the book even have names at all, and these three never come near each other.

But do you know what does pass the Bechdel Test? Mette Harrison’s new Book-of-Mormon themed novel, The Book of Abish (Kindle edition here), that’s what. It passes it in the first chapter and then keeps on passing it, on almost every page, until the last chapter. That’s because the whole point of The Book of Abish is to give the women of the book of Mormon their own stories–and their own names. And it is available from BCC Press today. [Read more…]