The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance

A few years ago, I took a Mormon Lit class at UVU.  It was a really interesting class and exposed me to new novels. Comedian Elna Baker's The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance was not a novel we read in that class, but our professor talked about it to us one day and read us an excerpt.  After hearing Baker's voice come to life via my professor, I had to get my hands on it. 

New York Regional is a hilarious yet touching memoir by a born and bred world-traveling Mormon. Her sense of humor sort of reminds me of Chelsea Handler, but not as crass. So I recommend this book with the caveat Baker uses in her dedication to her parents: " . . . aside from the nine-F words, thirteen Sh-words, four A-holes, page 257, and the entire Warren Beatty chapter . . . You might want to avoid chapters twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three . . ." 

Read on! 

Attack the Lusitania!

When I first saw my mom borrow this book from my grandpa, I was really excited to read it. Grandpa likes war books and this looked super exciting and about a topic I didn't know much about. Of course, it took me a while to get to reading Attack the Lusitania! amid the moves and book shuffles and the fact that I always want to read about 500 books, but I finally banned myself from the library and got to reading the books we have at home. 

I really wanted to like this novel. But no. I didn't like it at all. First of all, why even make the characters LDS? Is that a requirement for being published by Covenant? Because the characters being LDS didn't seem to have much of tie-in other than getting some of the characters to talk, but that could have been done in another way. And why were there all these different perspectives? The novel is barely over 200 pages, and I'm supposed to follow three different story-lines, one of which disappears halfway through? It made it so hard to get to know the characters and feel for them. There was no character development and I didn't feel attached to any of them. 

It was interesting to learn more about the Lusitania and the circumstances under which it was attacked, but I learned just as much about the Lusitania from The American Heiress, and I'm going to recommend that book to you instead!