Joanna Brooks – författare

"Ripped-from-the-headlines. . . . Alex''s story is gripping as she comes across as a reliable witness against the cruelties of so-called reparative therapy." —The Bay Area ReporterWhen Alex Cooper was fifteen years old, life was pretty ordinary in her suburban town and nice Mormon family. But something was gnawing at her that made her feel different. These feelings exploded when she met Yvette, a girl with whom Alex fell quickly in love.Alex knew she was holding a secret that could shatter her family, her church community, and her life. Yet when this secret couldn''t be hidden any longer, she told her parents that she was gay, and the nightmare began. She was driven from her home in Southern California to Utah, where, against her will, her parents handed her over to fellow Mormons who promised to save Alex from her homosexuality.For eight harrowing months, Alex was held captive in an unlicensed "residential treatment program" where she was physically and verbally abused. Many days she was forced to stand facing a wall wearing a heavy backpack full of rocks. With the help of a dedicated legal team in Salt Lake City, Alex eventually escaped and made legal history in Utah by winning the right to live under the law''s protection as an openly gay teenager.Saving Alex is a bold, inspiring story of one girl''s fight for freedom, acceptance, and truth."Alex Cooper''s story is a call to action." —Chad Griffin, president, Human Rights Campaign"[A] heart-wrenching, suspenseful memoir." —BUST Magazine"A brave and important book." —Robbie Rogers, author of Coming Out to Play

To this day, churchgoing Mormons report that they hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African-Americans are the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits--due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence--were destined to come to earth with a "curse" of black skin. This claim can be made in many Mormon Sunday Schools without fear of contradiction. You are more likely to encounter opposition if you argue that the ban on the ordination of Black Mormons was a product of human racism. Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, says Joanna Brooks, the priesthood and temple ban on Blacks has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth-telling, and determined silence. As America begins to come to terms with the costs of white privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring white people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people''s history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.

To this day, churchgoing Mormons report that they hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African-Americans are the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits--due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence--were destined to come to earth with a "curse" of black skin. This claim can be made in many Mormon Sunday Schools without fear of contradiction. You are more likely to encounter opposition if you argue that the ban on the ordination of Black Mormons was a product of human racism. Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, says Joanna Brooks, the priesthood and temple ban on Blacks has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth-telling, and determined silence. As America begins to come to terms with the costs of white privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring white people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people's history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.

To this day, churchgoing Mormons report that they hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African-Americans are the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits--due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence--were destined to come to earth with a "curse" of black skin. This claim can be made in many Mormon Sunday Schools without fear of contradiction. You are more likely to encounter opposition if you argue that the ban on the ordination of Black Mormons was a product of human racism. Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, says Joanna Brooks, the priesthood and temple ban on Blacks has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth-telling, and determined silence. As America begins to come to terms with the costs of white privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring white people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people''s history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.

With at least fifteen million adherents around the globe, Mormonism maintains a powerful claim not only on the loyalties of believers but on the interests and imagination of non-Mormons as well. No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive take on sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth century stand against the ERA and its twenty-first century fight against same-sex marriage, the LDS Church has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. Even as the LDS Church has maintained a very conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism rooted in Mormon history and theology. To be a Mormon feminist is to live the tension between the visionary theology of Mormonism (for example, the faith's distinctive belief that God is a married couple, a man and woman) and its conservative institutional politics, between women's experience-based knowledge and the all-male Church hierarchy. This groundbreaking book gathers together for the first time essential writings of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement from its historic beginnings in 1970 to its vibrant present, offering a guide to the best of Mormon feminist thought and writing. This volume presents the voices of Mormon women--including historians, humorists, theologians, activists, and artists--as they have challenged assumptions and stereotypes, recovered lost histories of Mormon women's leadership, explored the empowering potential of Mormon theology, pushed for progress and change in the contemporary church, and joined their voices with other feminists of faith hoping to build a better world. Designed for use by book clubs, study groups, and classes, this highly accessible but rigorously developed book includes a timeline of key events in Mormon feminist history, discussion questions, and a topical guide.

This groundbreaking collection gathers together for the first time the essential writings of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement--from its historic beginnings in the 1970s to its vibrant present, offering the best Mormon feminist thought and writing.No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith''s distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. But even as the church has maintained a conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism by recovering the lost histories of female leadership and exploring the empowering potential of Mormon theology. The selections in this book-many gathered from out-of-print anthologies, magazines, and other ephemera--walk the reader through the history of Mormon feminism, from the second-wave feminism of the 1970s to contemporary debates over the ordination of women.Collecting essays, speeches, poems, and prose, Mormon Feminism presents the diverse voices of Mormon women as they challenge assumptions and stereotypes, push for progress and change in the contemporary LDS Church, and band together with other feminists of faith hoping to build a better world.

This groundbreaking collection gathers together for the first time the essential writings of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement--from its historic beginnings in the 1970s to its vibrant present, offering the best Mormon feminist thought and writing.No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith''s distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. But even as the church has maintained a conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism by recovering the lost histories of female leadership and exploring the empowering potential of Mormon theology. The selections in this book-many gathered from out-of-print anthologies, magazines, and other ephemera--walk the reader through the history of Mormon feminism, from the second-wave feminism of the 1970s to contemporary debates over the ordination of women.Collecting essays, speeches, poems, and prose, Mormon Feminism presents the diverse voices of Mormon women as they challenge assumptions and stereotypes, push for progress and change in the contemporary LDS Church, and band together with other feminists of faith hoping to build a better world.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom''s writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

This volume brings together an unprecedented gathering of women and men from the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions. Featuring hard-to-find writings from colonists and colonized, citizens and slaves, religious visionaries and scandal-dogged actresses, these wide-ranging selections present a panorama of the diverse, vibrant world facing women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An expansive introduction, along with rich contextual headnotes, makes this an indispensable text for students and scholars of literature, history, and women''s and gender studies. With writings from figures like Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint L''Ouverture, to name just a few, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions recovers the revolutionary moment in which women stepped into a globalizing world and imagined themselves free.

This groundbreaking collection gathers together for the first time the essential writings of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement--from its historic beginnings in the 1970s to its vibrant present, offering the best Mormon feminist thought and writing.No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. But even as the church has maintained a conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism by recovering the lost histories of female leadership and exploring the empowering potential of Mormon theology. The selections in this book-many gathered from out-of-print anthologies, magazines, and other ephemera--walk the reader through the history of Mormon feminism, from the second-wave feminism of the 1970s to contemporary debates over the ordination of women.Collecting essays, speeches, poems, and prose, Mormon Feminism presents the diverse voices of Mormon women as they challenge assumptions and stereotypes, push for progress and change in the contemporary LDS Church, and band together with other feminists of faith hoping to build a better world.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

This Indian World is the first-ever edition of collected writings by pioneering Native American religious and political leader Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). Occom's letters, sermons, journals, petitions, and hymns offer unparalleled views into eighteenth-century Native America. Essential reading for scholars of early and Native American history, literature, and religion.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, 'the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.' This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom''s writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color-this anthology puts all these eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another in an unprecedented archive of primary sources that will become indispensable to students and scholars of the eighteenth century in English, history, and women's and gender studies.

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color-this anthology puts all these eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another in an unprecedented archive of primary sources that will become indispensable to students and scholars of the eighteenth century in English, history, and women's and gender studies.

This volume brings together an unprecedented gathering of women and men from the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions. Featuring hard-to-find writings from colonists and colonized, citizens and slaves, religious visionaries and scandal-dogged actresses, these wide-ranging selections present a panorama of the diverse, vibrant world facing women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An expansive introduction, along with rich contextual headnotes, makes this an indispensable text for students and scholars of literature, history, and women''s and gender studies. With writings from figures like Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint L''Ouverture, to name just a few, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions recovers the revolutionary moment in which women stepped into a globalizing world and imagined themselves free.

A grounded, tender, and mournful reckoning with the catastrophes that launched poor, white Anglos into their role as itinerant foot soldiers for modern imperialism-now in paperback with a new preface   Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. For generations, they lived hardscrabble lives, eking out subsistence in one place after another as they continually moved west in search of a better life. Why, Brooks wondered, did her people and countless other poor English subjects abandon their homeland for such unremitting hardship? The question leads her on a journey through an obscure dimension of American history.   Why We Left reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, presenting a powerful restorying of how we arrived at our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience, Brooks offers a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island.   She shares folk ballads such as “Edward,” which reveals the influence of deforestation on the dislocation of early Anglo-American peasant immigrants, and “The House Carpenter’s Wife,” which emphasizes the impact of economic instability and the colonial enterprise on women. From these ballads, tragic and heartrending, Brooks uncovers an archaeology of the worldviews of America’s earliest immigrants. This tenth-anniversary edition includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.

This book guides you through five different approaches to qualitative data analysis – thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, grounded theory, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. It applies each of them to a common data set, this book gives a step-by-step guide to each approach and helps you work out which is the right one for you to use. With chapters on the history of qualitative research in psychology, ethical considerations, and data collection methods including sources such as Instagram and Tik Tok, this book is the ultimate resource for those engaged in qualitative psychological research.

This book guides you through five different approaches to qualitative data analysis – thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, grounded theory, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. It applies each of them to a common data set, this book gives a step-by-step guide to each approach and helps you work out which is the right one for you to use. With chapters on the history of qualitative research in psychology, ethical considerations, and data collection methods including sources such as Instagram and Tik Tok, this book is the ultimate resource for those engaged in qualitative psychological research.

With a highly pragmatic, yet rigorous and pragmatically driven approach, this edited book explores demonstrates qualitative research with an applied approach. Using not only theory but real world setting, readers are introduced to the function and relevance of qualitative methods in psychological research. Exemplified through the contributions of various experts from across the different sub-disciplines of psychology, this text takes a versatile approach to explaining methods in research and covers a broad range of methods in a variety of settings.This book will appeal to those with an interest in qualitative methods across the spectrum of psychology and beyond. Offering an introduction to applied qualitative research in psychology with a distinctively applied approach, this title is apt for undergraduate psychology students taking modules in research methods, executing research-based projects or those undertaking Masters and taught doctoral level programs in psychology.

With a highly pragmatic, yet rigorous and pragmatically driven approach, this edited book explores demonstrates qualitative research with an applied approach. Using not only theory but real world setting, readers are introduced to the function and relevance of qualitative methods in psychological research. Exemplified through the contributions of various experts from across the different sub-disciplines of psychology, this text takes a versatile approach to explaining methods in research and covers a broad range of methods in a variety of settings.This book will appeal to those with an interest in qualitative methods across the spectrum of psychology and beyond. Offering an introduction to applied qualitative research in psychology with a distinctively applied approach, this title is apt for undergraduate psychology students taking modules in research methods, executing research-based projects or those undertaking Masters and taught doctoral level programs in psychology.

With a highly pragmatic, yet rigorous and pragmatically driven approach, this edited book explores demonstrates qualitative research with an applied approach. Using not only theory but real world setting, readers are introduced to the function and relevance of qualitative methods in psychological research. Exemplified through the contributions of various experts from across the different sub-disciplines of psychology, this text takes a versatile approach to explaining methods in research and covers a broad range of methods in a variety of settings.This book will appeal to those with an interest in qualitative methods across the spectrum of psychology and beyond. Offering an introduction to applied qualitative research in psychology with a distinctively applied approach, this title is apt for undergraduate psychology students taking modules in research methods, executing research-based projects or those undertaking Masters and taught doctoral level programs in psychology.

This dynamic user-focused book will help you to get the data you want from your interviews. It provides practical guidance regarding technique, gives top-tips from real world case studies and shares achievable checklists and interview plans.

Whether you are doing interviews in your own research or just using other researchers’ data, this book will tell you everything you need to know about designing, planning, conducting and analyzing quality interviews. It explains how to:

-          Construct ethical research designs

-          Record and manage your data

-          Transcribe your notes

-          Analyse your findings

-          Disseminate your conclusions

Written using clear, jargon-free terminology and with coverage of practical, theoretical and philosophical issues all grounded in examples from real interviews, this is the ideal guide for new and experienced researchers alike.

Nigel King is Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Huddersfield.

Christine Horrocks is Professor of Applied Social Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Joanna Brooks is Lecturer in the Manchester Centre for Health Psychology at the University of Manchester. 

 

 

This dynamic user-focused book will help you to get the data you want from your interviews. It provides practical guidance regarding technique, gives top-tips from real world case studies and shares achievable checklists and interview plans.

Whether you are doing interviews in your own research or just using other researchers’ data, this book will tell you everything you need to know about designing, planning, conducting and analyzing quality interviews. It explains how to:

-          Construct ethical research designs

-          Record and manage your data

-          Transcribe your notes

-          Analyse your findings

-          Disseminate your conclusions

Written using clear, jargon-free terminology and with coverage of practical, theoretical and philosophical issues all grounded in examples from real interviews, this is the ideal guide for new and experienced researchers alike.

Nigel King is Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Huddersfield.

Christine Horrocks is Professor of Applied Social Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Joanna Brooks is Lecturer in the Manchester Centre for Health Psychology at the University of Manchester. 

 

 

From her days of feeling like “a root beer among the Cokes”—Coca-Cola being a forbidden fruit for Mormon girls like her—Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set her apart from others. But, in her eyes, that made her special; the devout LDS home she grew up in was filled with love, spirituality, and an emphasis on service. With Marie Osmond as her celebrity role model and plenty of Sunday School teachers to fill in the rest of the details, Joanna felt warmly embraced by the community that was such an integral part of her family. But as she grew older, Joanna began to wrestle with some tenets of her religion, including the Church’s stance on women’s rights and homosexuality. In 1993, when the Church excommunicated a group of feminists for speaking out about an LDS controversy, Joanna found herself searching for a way to live by the leadings of her heart and the faith she loved. The Book of Mormon Girl is a story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Joanna’s journey through her faith explores a side of the religion that is rarely put on display: its humanity, its tenderness, its humor, its internal struggles. In Joanna’s hands, the everyday experience of being a Mormon—without polygamy, without fundamentalism—unfolds in fascinating detail. With its revelations about a faith so often misunderstood and characterized by secrecy, The Book of Mormon Girl is a welcome advocate and necessary guide.