No matter what their religious or political beliefs, readers will agree Joanna Brooks has the courage of her convictions. In The Book of Mormon Girl, she shares memories of a happy Orange County, Calif., childhood in a family of devout Mormons, followed by a painful split with the church in adulthood over social issues.
As a girl, Brooks absorbed the stories of her forebears' treks west and followed the guidelines of Mormon role model Marie Osmond and the teachings of her church. "I loved being a Mormon girl, a root beer among the Cokes," she writes of her "un-caffeinated" youth. (Her journey is poignant but not humorless: she recalls equating the Equal Rights Amendment with unisex bathrooms in a sixth-grade report.)
At 17, Scott realized her dream, enrolling at Brigham Young University, thrilled to seek Joseph Smith's "truth and light." But her arrival coincided with a wave of Mormon feminism and a subsequent crackdown on feminists and intellectuals proposing gay and civil rights, leading to a wave of disfellowshipping and excommunication between 1993 and 1996. Brooks's heart rejected her church's rules; she graduated from BYU but returned her diploma in protest.
"I am a Mormon feminist," Brooks writes, and in her painfully honest memoir, she describes Mormonism as "my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home." Today, as current events and pop culture bring the religion to the foreground, Joanna Brooks offers a memoir of the faith and what it means to her, for better and worse.--Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller