This is the Place
 Carolyn Howard-Johnson
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 America House Book Publishers
  ISBN: 1588513521
Amazon's price is: $19.95

In 1959, journalist Sky Eccles, remembers the underlying tensions of the Mormon everyday culture into which she was born.

In This is the Place, we meet Skylar Eccles, umpteenth child of a sprawling, brawling family headed by a Mormon father & a Protestant mother, with grandparents, aunts & uncles & counsins galore, Sometimes so numerous as to be utterly confusing. The author does supply us with “A Work Page from the Genealogy Files of Josephine May Eccles,” which actually left me more at sea.

However, with Carolyn Howard-Johnson's skill with her craft, we are drawn into this many-peopled world, where relationships are fraught with underlying secrets, where tithes & taxes loom on everyone's horizon in this Utah of the past.

By 1959, the vast family lands of Sky's ancestors who came to this wild state a century before, have dwindled to a handful of near-abandoned acres. The family too is dispersed. The memories, however, are not. For Sky, the only way out of the maelstrom of inheritance into which she was born & raised, is to leave, & in that leaving gain a perspective about her parents, her place in the world, & the state of her emotions.

If you can keep track of everyone in This is the Place, if you can find the multitude of pearls of descriptive writing, lively dialogues & fascinating historical details amid the torrent of breathless, often out of left field connections, you are going like this read.

All in all, a unique glimpse of a place, a time & a people who, to everyone living outside of Utah, are still mysterious. Quite well written, with some lyrical patchworked stories about one woman's life & her history within a closed society, her memories of how she tries to toe the party line, & her eventual break for freedom. Did it gladden my heart? No, the often abrasive tone about the oppression by a host of written & unwritten rules, was withering. As too the Big Brotherism of this society. The stories told, on the other hand, are alive with history, movement, curiosity.

At the end there is a Reading Group Guide of questions for serious discussion, which transforms this novel into a textbook about closed societies & their impact.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson has written the screenplay for The Killing Ground & has finished a book of short stories called Harkening.
(11/10/02)

Rebecca