These Latter Days

Full disclosure: Laura Kalpakian is my writing teacher. I have been inspired by her as a teacher and feel my writing really has improved since I started working with her.

I enjoyed a few of her contemporary novels, and happily discovered that she’s as good a novelist as she is a teacher. But I haven’t felt qualified to review her books, even though I review everything else, because I’m used to her critiquing my work, not the other way around.

“These Latter Days” is the first of her historical novels I read, and I loved it.

The story explores a patriarchal Mormon community in the late 1800s/early 1900s from the points of view of the women in the Douglass family. Ruth Douglass marries and has six children with a man who turns out show more to be a delusional zealot. Ruth and the other women in the story are fascinating characters with challenging lives. While not all of her daughters’ lives turn out swell, there is something to admire in each of them. Sadly, her two sons are unable to overcome their genetics and turn out as useless as their father. However, a couple of Ruth’s sons in law are considerate and worthy of the Douglass women, and Ruth herself finds an equal partner in Lucius Tipton, an atheist doctor living in a Mormon town.

I didn’t enjoy reading the parts where Ruth and various of her relations found themselves repressed and unhappy because of their unfortunate choices in marriage. Of course, these scenes serve the novel, because I was eager to see these women break free. Ruth tells her daughter that women have three choices: to be a virgin, a wife or a widow, but Ruth proves that doesn’t have to be the case.

The jacket blurb bills “These Latter Days” as “a complex novel of revelation and rebellion.” It depicts the lives of Latter-day Saints in a realistic and compelling way that I have not seen before in other novels.

I’m excited to read “Caveat” and “American Cookery,” which feature a few of my favorite characters from “These Latter Days.” show less