Book #3: Harvest

Title: Harvest: Memoir of a Mormon Missionary
Author: Jacob Young

I have a writing friend who has been working on a memoir of her mission for the last several years, and in my fiction class this week my professor talked about how a mission often provides good fodder for an author, so I shouldn't be surprised to see this mission memoir. In Harvest, Jacob Young writes about his experiences serving in and around Samara, Russia from 1999 to 2001. The book is pretty raw-- there's language and experiences (I can think of one in particular that had my eyebrows raised!) that would never appear in a Deseret Book publication. Young talks about how returned missionaries always say that the two years they spent serving were the best years of their lives, and he challenges those assumptions. He talks frankly about his loss of faith around the midpoint of his mission, and about how he went about finding it again. I found that refreshing, because in the non-Deseret Book literature I read by people who self-identify as Mormon, they often deal with their doubts, but not with overcoming or learning to live with those doubts. Young also showed how, on a mission where all of a missionary's time and efforts are supposed to be directed toward gospel study, it's easy to force those doubts to a head. While many of us learn to overcome or live with doubt, I think it would be a lot harder when religion is the primary motivating force of each day like it is on a mission.

I think that Harvest is a well-written account of one elder's mission (although there are lapses where I felt like Young was using big words to show off and the story definitely could have used some tightening-- there were other places where the pacing wasn't great-- he spent a long time talking about his first companion and about his crisis of faith, but sped through the last year of the mission in a few pages). I think it would be most interesting for an LDS audience, for Russian-speaking RMs (my husband is one and he enjoyed the passages I sent him), and to people who have gone through or are in the midst of similar faith-crises.