Handley, American Fork (Reviewed by Peter Wilson)

    I enjoyed George Handley’s latest book quite a lot.

    The three main characters of this book definitely feel like the types of people you would meet in Utah Valley & American Fork. Zacharias is the clever, crotchety old man who is quick to find fault with the local Mormon-dominated culture. Alba and John are a married couple at BYU. Alba’s mother is a Chilean immigrant to the States who converted to the Mormon Church. John is a standards-keeping, multigenerational Mormon.

    The book is about Alba’s search for her father and Zacharias’ parallel quest to find healing in the aftermath of the collapse of his family. The plot is quite good, but it takes a while for all the different strands of the book to come together. Half of the chapters in the book are letters from Zacharias, which slows the book’s pace.

    One of my favorite sections of the book is Alba’s visit to Chile to learn about her father, who she suspects was one of the disappeared people under the dictator Pinochet. The depiction of what it is like to search the broken past of a dictator-ruled country felt realistic and well-researched. I found it thrilling and heart-breaking.

    The book was sometimes a little preachy, particularly because Zacharias is long-winded, but the other side of that was that the book was often really insightful, inspiring (especially about nature and the Bible) and occasionally even quite funny.