Christopher Kimball Bigelow,
Zarahemla Books, $15.95
Provo resident Bigelow, founder of the satirical Sugar Beet, a goof on Mormon news, and editor of The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer, a book version of the Beet, has written his first novel. A cursory read shows it's full of the same off-kilter humor that has been Bigelow's trademark. Eliza is a 30-something Mormon who begins dating a divorced guy whose adopted daughter's birth mother practices Wicca. "As Eliza negotiates her place in this clan, she's forced to reckon with her Mormon identity and her sometimes overactive religious imagination in unsettling new ways," the cover promises. Probably too much religion for non-Mormons, but believers might appreciate Bigelow's nonorthodox view.
The Arc and the Sediment
Christine Allen-Yazzie, Utah State University Press, $24.95
Yazzie's first novel tells the story of a "gin-steeped" white woman, Gretta Bitsilly, who leaves Utah to track down her Navajo husband in Arizona. Using a laptop computer and a dictionary, she tries to create a new life for herself in words as she grapples with why her marriage has broken up, racial discrimination and the sheer difficulty of making it through each day. It's not a happy story, but it's original and well-written. Before it was even published, the manuscript won a first-place award from the Utah Arts Council.
Religion, Politics and Sugar
Matthew C. Godfrey, Utah State University Press, $34.95
Godfrey, a historian in Missoula, Mont., details here the early 20th-century controversy over the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, controlled by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as federal regulators aimed to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West. Godfrey's 200-page history, complete with footnotes, explains the role the LDS Church played in the economy of the Intermountain West and how that role was affected by national politics. An earlier product of the research in the book won an award in 2002 from the Mormon History Association.
- Anne Wilson,
The Salt Lake Tribune
