Taylor, “Heaven Knows Why!” (reviewed by Dave Combe, 7/18/1995)

Review
Original Review Date: 7/18/1995

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Title: Heaven Knows Why!
Author: Samuel W. Taylor
Publisher: American Book-Stratford Press, Inc
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 1948
Number of Pages: 213
Binding: Paper
Status: Out of Print

Reviewed by Dave Combe for the Association for Mormon Letters
Review date: 7/18/1995

Samuel W. Taylor’s tale Heaven Knows Why! is a book I have heard about for years but never read until now. I’ve missed out.

Set in a never-identified valley Taylor describes a comedy of errors over about two days where following a visitation from the long dead Moroni Skinner to his grandson Jackson Skinner Whitetop everyone and everything is changed to be just as it is supposed to be.

I was delighted by the hilariously bureaucratic and very human heaven where Moroni Skinner “worked in the Compiling Office of the Accounting Section of the Current History Division of the Records Department”. Worry over his grandson’s lack of progress makes Moroni’s work suffer. “The Office Chief had him on the carpet and told him there were plenty of hard-working angels who’d be glad to have his job. His wife Lucy began pecking at him. Did he want to get left behind while all their friends went on to greater glory?”

So Moroni visits Jackson and tells him to marry the Bishop’s daughter who is engaged to the Bishop’s counselor. The couple is scheduled to marry the next day.

In his efforts to make this revelation become fact Jackson learns what he really is the Bishop learns that revelation may come through the most unlikely of people and the town learns that God can use everyone and everything including our most human failings to his purpose.

Published in Collier’s in 1948 this is an example of Mormon literature that was originally published for the general reading public and not for a Mormon audience. It is hard for me to tell how some of the inside humor reads to that broader audience. Those only familiar with Samuel Taylor’s historical books as I was will enjoy this look at a Mormonism that in some ways no longer exists but in another way is all around us in the varied types of people the reader will recognize in his or her own branches wards and stakes.

The book is well-made and designed and easy to read.

If you are willing to have a laugh (lots of them actually) at your own expense, at the church culture, and at the folklore that surrounds us you will enjoy reading this book.

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