The AML Online Book Club will be discussing Rosalyn Eves’ novel Beyond the Mapped Stars on April 24, 7 PM MDT. Rosalyn will join us to answer questions about the book. All are invited!
The Dialogue Book Report Podcast just released a discussion about the book between Rosalyn, Lisa Torcasso Downing, and Andrew Hall.
Beyond the Mapped Stars is a YA historical novel about Elizabeth, a 1878 rural Utah girl who yearns for higher education and a life of science beyond her community, while also valuing her family and her faith. Set at the time of a solar eclipse that brought many of the country’s great scientists to Colorado, it portrays Elizabeth’s struggles to integrate science and faith, and her family and romance with education and a career. It is a Whitney Award finalist.
In the podcast, we discuss:
- Women’s Exponent editor Lula Green Richards’ quote, “I urge readers to utterly repudiate the pernicious dogma that marriage and a practical lifework are incompatible.” (August 15, 1877), and the role it plays in the novel.
- Why is easier to study 1848 Budapest (the setting of Rosalyn’s first YA fantasy trilogy) than 1878 Denver.
- Other notable recent fiction, including James Goldberg and Janci Patterson’s The Bollywood Lover’s Club.
- Rosalyn’s dissertation, “Mapping rhetorical frontiers: Women’s spatial rhetorics in the nineteenth-century American West,” which includes a study of the rhetoric of Eliza R. Snow.
Also see Rosalyn’s Irreantum article, “Making Themselves at Home: The Domestic Rhetorics of LDS Women, 1872–1875,” which analyzes women’s writing in Woman’s Exponent.
We also hope you participate in our May book discussion, Virginia Sorensen’s classic 1942 novel, A Little Lower than the Angels, on May 22, 7 PM MDT. The Zoom link will be the same:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87507107246?pwd=V0praVJiWE9jU1dyOWJNcHNZa2xrdz09
Meeting ID: 875 0710 7246 Passcode: 488895
Rosalyn Eves teaches English at Southern Utah University and writes young adult novels in her spare time. She earned a PhD in English from Penn State in 2008, where she wrote about Women’s spatial rhetorics in the nineteenth-century American West, focusing on the rhetorics of four very different women of the West, including Eliza R. Snow. She has written a young adult historical fantasy trilogy, set in 1848 Austria-Hungary, starting with Blood Rose Rebellion, which won a Whitney Award for best YA fantasy.
Past AML Online Book Club events:
- Sept. 2021: James Goldberg and Janci Patterson. The Bollywood Lover’s Club
- Nov. 2021: Bela Petsco. Nothing Very Important and Other Stories
- Dec. 2021: Lisa Van Orman Hadley. Irreversible Things
- Jan. 2022: Terryl Givens. Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism
- Feb. 2022: Steven L. Peck. Wandering Realities: Mormonish Short Fiction
- March 2022: Irreantum: “Wine into Water: Contemporary LDS Poems about Jesus”
