Eli's sealing

Last year, we had a baby wedding.

I spent days perusing websites for the perfect dress for Rose to wear.

I spent more days scouring the internet for all-white clothes for the rest of us to wear.

I had Rose's picture taken ahead of time and sent out invitations.

I encouraged friends to attend, and secured the temple months in advance for a prime Saturday afternoon sealing appointment.

I hired a photographer and filled an entire wall with photos from the blessed event.

The whole family went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant after the sealing.

Like I said, a baby wedding. And it was a perfect day.

This year, my parents decided to visit a couple of weeks ago, and Ed and I looked at each other and said, "Maybe we should have Eli sealed to us while they're here."

I reserved the temple for a weeknight and told my friends they were under no obligation to attend. We changed the date a few days before when we thought he might be able to get in for surgery at the last minute.

Except for Eli, we all wore the same things as last year.

My mom was the photographer.

The whole family went to Cold Stone and got ice cream after the sealing.

When Ed and I got in bed that night, I said, "If last year we had a baby wedding, this year we had a baby elopement."

And it was still a perfect day.

Book Review: The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro

Title: The Art Forger
Author: B.A. Shapiro
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13 for adult themes, sexual references, and language

There are reliable narrators and unreliable narrators, and then there are narrators like Claire Roth, who you want to believe is reliable and stable, but who does such stupid things sometimes that it's hard to know what the author thinks of her. Claire earns her living by copying the works of master artists so rich people can hang them above their couches. She has an MFA and serious skills, but she also has baggage which has led her to be blackballed by the art scene. When Aiden Markel approaches her and wants her to copy a painting stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum during the 1990s heist, she reluctantly agrees, despite the illegality of the whole situation. Markel assures her that she will be protected.

While the story of what happens during the painting of the forgery, and what happens in its aftermath is compelling in and of itself, the story of what is going on in Claire's head is a lot more interesting. It's ironic that this is a book that talks so much about color, but the narrative is all shades of gray. It's a fascinating read.

Book Review: The Penitent by C. David Belt (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Penitent
Author: C. David Belt
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG-13 for adult themes, violence, and creepiness

Vampire professors at BYU? Vampire doctors at University Hospital? Vampires teaching your child's Primary class? These are all possibilities in the world C. David Belt creates in The Penitent, where "good" vampires have freed themselves from their power to Lilith. Word of this accomplishment has spread, and now Moira and Carl Morgan, the first vampires to be sealed in the temple, must face the power of their enemies.

I thought this was an ingenious concept for a book, and I was impressed with the way Belt allowed readers to jump into the second book in the novel, but the story soon seemed like it favored outer conflict rather than the inner conflict I found so compelling in the early chapters.

Book Review: Flight from Blithmore by Jacob Gowans (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Flight from Blithmore
Author: Jacob Gowans
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG

Flight from Blithmore tells the story of Henry, a carpenter, who wishes to marry Isabelle, the only girl he's ever loved. Unfortunately, Isabelle's family considers Henry beneath their daughter, so he has to do something to prove his worthiness. When Isabelle's father gets in trouble with the law, Henry has the perfect opportunity. The story is kind of an epic fairy tale, and feels like a cross between The Odyssey and The Canterbury Tales, with some of The Princess Bride thrown in. This might sound like an engaging combination, but it's long and somewhat convoluted, and feels out of place in this category.

Book Review: City of the Saints by D.J. Butler

Title: City of the Saints
Author: D.J. Butler
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG

Once again, I'm rounding out my reading (and reviewing) of the Whitney finalists with the adult speculative novels.  Of the eight categories, this is the one that is always the most challenging for me, both in terms of the genre and the length of the novels, but I just can't get smart and read these books first, and save something I want to read for the end. Oh well, maybe next year.

That said, City of the Saints has an interesting premise-- Mormon Steampunk set in the 1850s, with Orson Pratt, Edgar Allan Poe, and Porter Rockwell figuring prominently, but not in any form you might recognize them. The book reminded me a bit of last year's A Night of Blacker Darkness, but it was less zany and ultimately less successful for me. But I may have been prejudiced from the first line-- a book that begins "'This is insubordination, Dick!' the man in the tall top hat and cravat hissed" is just not going to be my kind of book. But it may be yours?

Book Review: The Space Between Us by Jessica Martinez (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Space Between Us
Author: Jessica Martinez
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG-13 for mature subject matter

Amelia is stable, hardworking, and a credit to her father, a pastor of a conservative congregation in Florida. Her younger sister, Charly, is wild and impulsive, and often needs Amelia to help her get out of scrapes. But when Charly learns that she's pregnant, Amelia has to make a sacrifice she's not sure she's willing to make. Their grandmother ships the girls off to Canada, where their deceased mother grew up, so Charly can deliver her baby in secret. Amelia is her beard-- if Charly went to Canada by herself it would look suspicious, so Amelia gives up field hockey, her friends, and her senior year of high school to spend the winter in Banff.

This was definitely the strongest of the YA novels this year. It reminded me of a good Carol Lynch Williams story-- where the conflict is more in Amelia's head (Can she forgive Charly? Are some secrets good? What will she do with her own life? Is she her sister's keeper?). This is the kind of book that I would have considered a gem even outside the context of the awards reading.

As an aside, I hadn't thought of this before starting this review, but there are some interesting parallels betwee The Space Between Us and Of Grace and Chocolate, even down to the dead mother.

Book Review: Dancing on Broken Glass by Ka Hancock (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Dancing on Broken Glass
Author: Ka Hancock
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG-13 for some language, sexual references and adult themes

Some people might consider Lucy and Mickey to be unlucky souls. She was orphaned as a teenager and had breast cancer in her twenties. He has bipolar disorder. But they both feel lucky to have found each other. That doesn't mean that they'd do something as reckless as bring a child with their genetic time bombs into the world. But after ten years of marriage and a tubal ligation, Lucy learns that she's pregnant, and their whole lives shift.

Dancing on Broken Glass is what I want Jodi Picoult's novels to be. Yes, it's heart-wrenching, a story that's too painful to be believed in places, but Hancock manages to tell the story in a way that doesn't feel overdone or manipulative. Her experience as a nurse seems to have prepared her well to write a story where characters suffer from debilitating physical and mental illnesses, and to do it with compassion and strength. This was one of my favorite reads of the Whitney finalists, and I look forward to reading more of Hancock's work.

Book Review: V is for Virgin by Kelly Oram (Whitney Finalist)

Title: V is for Virgin
Author: Kelly Oram
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG-13 for language and subject matter

The downside of posting with a baby by your side is that he might delete your entire review, which is what just happened here, probably resulting in a shorter, less generous review than I would have written if I weren't so annoyed right now.

Val is a virgin. She has her reasons. But she doesn't share those reasons or that fact with her boyfriend of many months. When he wows her with a romantic dinner and then dumps her when she doesn't want to reward him for his hard work, she knows the whole school will hear about it. When a popular girl confronts Val in the cafeteria, Val gives her a dressing down she won't soon forget, especially since someone captures it and puts it on YouTube, where it gets hundreds of thousands of views. Then Val rebuffs the advances of Kyle, a rock star, and she becomes even more famous when he writes a song chronicling his attempts to seduce her. Pretty soon she's the face of abstinence, but at what cost?

V is for Virgin is an entertaining story. Val is a great character, and I like the way Oram includes a Mormon character in her story (Val's new boyfriend-- not the lecherous rock star). However, the story would have been much better at 260 pages than at 360-- my attention waned after a while and I felt that Oram included too many details (like the jewelry design side story) that could easily have been cut. Parents should be aware that the story does not restrain itself with teenage language or frank discussions of sex-- this is definitely a book for high school students, not precocious sixth-graders.

Book Review: Lady Outlaw by Stacy Henrie (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Lady Outlaw
Author: Stacy Henrie
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG

Rounding out the romance category is Stacy Henrie's Lady Outlaw. It was the last book I read in the category, and although an entertaining read, probably the weakest of the bunch. 

Jennie Jones is trying to hold on to the family ranch in Central Utah, but it seems that everything is conspiring against her. Her father is dead, and she feels the burden of caring for her younger brother and her grandmother. The bank keeps changing the terms of the mortgage, decreasing the amount of time she has to pay back the loan. If she doesn't have the full amount paid in a few months, she will have to turn the ranch over. And so she does what any girl in her situation would do-- she robs stagecoach robbers.

Shortly after Jennie embarks on her life of crime, Caleb enters her life as a ranch hand. Caleb is kind and good, and still mourning the loss of his fiancee in, you guessed it, a stagecoach robbery. Caleb and Jennie fall in love, but how will Caleb respond when he learns what Jennie has been doing?

The resolution of Lady Outlaw felt awfully convenient to me-- I had a hard time believing that Caleb would forgive and forget so easily. Furthermore, some of the book seems to center on Jennie's spiritual crisis-- members of her church treated her mother unfairly and Jennie has harbored resentment. It seems that most people living in her town are part of this congregation, and the town is a central Utah town in the 1800s, but there is no mention of Mormons, which seemed odd to me.

Book Review: Of Grace and Chocolate by Krista Lynne Jensen

Title: Of Grace and Chocolate
Author: Krista Lynne Jensen
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG

I apologize that the remainder of my Whitney reviews will be brief; I'm trying to get them all published before the awards banquet on Saturday, when they become irrelevant, and my time is limited to nap time these days. Because I know that people are waiting with baited breath to see what I have to say. Or not, but I still feel compelled to get this done.

That disclaimer out of the way, I really enjoyed Krista Lynne Jensen's Of Grace and Chocolate, a contender in the Romance category, but which would have worked equally well in mystery/suspense or general, since it seemed to go beyond the bounds of romance. One of the things I've really come to appreciate about the Romance category this year is the way that several of the books (this one, and both of Melanie Jacobson's novels) work within the framework of LDS culture. In Of Grace and Chocolate, Jill is an aspiring novelist and grunt worker at a publishing house. But she's okay with that, because she's finally freed herself of the burdens of her alcoholic mother and her unstable younger sister. She seems unwilling to let herself get too entangled with anyone, especially with Scott, who can't even remember that he snubbed her half a lifetime ago when they were both in high school. But then her sister shows up on her door with a baby, a suitcase full of money, and a group of violent drug dealers hot on her tail. Jill must rely on her faith, her ward members, and unfortunately, Scott Gentry, to help her through the situation.

This year, there were many gems in the Whitney Finalists, and I felt that Of Grace and Chocolate was one of them. It combined well-drawn, complicated characters with an engaging plot line, told from the perspective of LDS culture. I also appreciated that these weren't cookie-cutter Mormons-- Jill felt a lot more like the Mormons I know than the Mormons I often see represented in print. I hope to read more of Jensen's work in the future, but wouldn't be surprised to see her nominated in different categories.