Book #30: Bound for Canaan (Standing on Promises, Book 2)

Title: Bound for Canaan (Standing on Promises, Book 2)
Author: Margaret Blair Young and Darius Aidan Gray

I recently interviewed Margaret Young and I've been in the process of writing a review of Young and Gray's new documentary Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons for the winter issue of Segullah. I'd read the first of the Standing on Promises books a few years ago and loved it, so I decided to get my hands on the second and third volumes of the trilogy while on a black Mormons kick.

This installment of the story covers the late 1840s to the early 1890s and follows the story of the James, Flake, Abel, Gray and assorted other families. Like the first book, it was interesting and well-written. The footnotes for each chapter were fascinating. My only criticism is that perhaps it stuck a little bit too closely to the history and didn't have enough fiction. I felt like I was getting short vignettes from important events in the history of black Mormons, but not a lot of everyday events or character-building scenes to glue the events together. Overall, it's definitely worth reading and illuminates the unique situation of those who came to Utah either as the slaves of Mormon converts or as Mormon converts themselves.