"Jensen has a light touch and takes a more academic and philosophic approach than a dogmatic or moral one to these issues."
When a young, handsome teacher
pays particular attention to sixteen-year-old Zina Martin, she believes she has
found true love. Imagine her horror when she discovers her father has arranged
a marriage for her to his friend, a middle aged man who already has four wives.
When her lover accepts a job on the other side of the country and leaves
without her before she can share the news she is pregnant, her world falls
apart. The man she thought she loved never really loved her, but only used her.
She won’t marry the man her father has chosen for her, a man she doesn’t love.
Staying in the small polygamous
town she’s lived in all of her life isn’t an option. She runs away and is
fortunate to be picked up by a long haul trucker and his wife on their way
through Utah to Chicago. As she struggles to understand who she is and
determine her own values she learns the “gentile world” is nothing like she has
been taught by her family and leaders of the small religious community that had
been her whole world prior to her leaving. Good and evil can exist anywhere.
She misses her family and longs to reconnect with them beyond the postcard she
has post marked from various cities that simply says she’s fine.
When an Internet search leads her
to the first information she has had of her family in years, she faces her need
to reconnect.
Trust and security issues play a
major role in this novel. As do several modern hot button issues including
race, homosexuality, polygamy, sexual predators, and homeopathic medicine. Jensen
has a light touch and takes a more academic and philosophic approach than a
dogmatic or moral one to these issues. With strong characterization, the author
gives a picture of many pieces of America from a rural western community locked
in the past with its joys, sorrows, and abuses, then a low to middle class, big
city, black neighborhood, a sophisticated pent house and artistic life style
offered in Minneapolis, a backwoods southern community straddling the line
between the old and the new, to bits and pieces of Salt Lake City with its
recognition of its changing demographics.
Janet Kay Jensen is a long-time
educator who now lives in Logan, Utah, and in addition to being a full-time
writer volunteers as a literary tutor.
Reviewed by Jennie Hansen, Meridian Magazine March 2015
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