Review

Title: The Women’s Book of Mormon: Volume 1
Author: Mette Harrison
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 190
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13:  9781948218283
Price: 7.49

Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Of this title, Harrison says, in her introduction:

The title of this book is The Women’s Book of Mormon, but I should more expansively call it The Inclusive (Bisexual and Trans and Non-Binary and Ace and Intersex and Lesbian and Poly) Book of Mormon.  There are single women here who never have children and grieve over it, women who are married and don’t have children and grieve over it, but also women who are not interested in having children, lesbian women, and non-binary and trans and ace and intersex and poly and bi characters that would otherwise probably not appear in our conception of spiritual history, but who belong there (ix).

If that doesn’t whet your appetite for this book, then knowing that Harrison has also written The Book of Laman, The Book of Abish, or The Book of Korihor probably won’t either.

That would be a pity.

The conceit Harrison uses to explain the origin of this book is that it is an oral record, memorized by the women who keep it, and added to by each of them, and presenting a history that parallels the record kept by the men — but a record kept orally.  This is not a new concept, and indeed such works as Beowulf and The Song of Igor’s campaign may well have come through oral transmission from pre-literate people.  The Epic of Sundiata, in all its versions, is still orally transmitted, as are many narratives of peoples of the Philippines.  So when Harrison begins her tale with “The Book of Sariah,” wife to Lehi and mother of the feuding, self-centered men, she launches into a totally credible adventure.

The books of each successive woman parallel the written records of the men, which allows Harrison to comment slyly and sharply on the written record.  It also allows her to record the presence of a Mother God, who ministers to these women.  And it allows her to make comments that are relevant to today’s society.  For example, this is what Saren says in “The Book of Saren” about the lament of King Noah’s concubines:

They will lament to God that no one will look at them again after the king has taken them as his own.  But God will say unto them, you have your reward.  You sought only men’s praise, and you have it, and now you understand how frivolous it is, how it lasts for but a moment.  Your fine clothing will molder.  Your beautiful hair will gray and fall out.  Your lips will grow soft and wrinkled.  Your eyes will go dim.  But if you had trusted God, you would see have seen the worth of your own soul.  If you had thought of the future, you would have daughters who would care for you and feed you in your old age.  They would rejoice with you in heaven.  But now you have nothing. (93)

And, just to drive the final nail into the coffin, Saren continues:

Beware of the sin of believing your value comes from the lust of men.  Beware the rewards of kings, who can only offer jewels and gold.  Everlasting life and joy come from God alone, and you must seek those things. (93)

This may seem like a harsh judgment, like that of the five wise virgins upon the five foolish virgins.  Saren is a woman who feels she is a man, is in the wrong body, and has no children.  At this point in her life, she is beginning the search for the next oracle to transmit the narrative.  So this rant tells much about her, as well as much about Noah’s wives and concubines.  Harrison also, through a later narrator named Hesha, brings in the idea that Abinadi is the son of Noah by one of his wives, which accounts for the impact he makes on the court, on Noah, and on Alma.  He turns against all his privilege, and in that way frees himself to be the vessel of prophecy.  In that manner, he is following Saren’s advice to “seek those things.”

The gaps in the narrative of the Book of Mormon leave Harrison free to make such suppositions, and ring changes on them that amuse, intrigue, and entice the reader, and sometimes shock.  For example, Mosiah the second, the son of King Benjamin, is portrayed as a child adopted from among the street kids of Zarahemla, and his wife as a former prostitute from the same milieu, so that the rebellion of Ammon, Aaron, Omner, and Himni against their father and his teachings becomes more understandable.  I won’t spoil the book for you, because I want to encourage you to read it, but Harrison is very canny with how she works with all the loose ends that Mormon assumes we will accept, and especially the places where he says “But enough about that, let’s get back to the history.”

One of the themes Harrison gets back to over and over is the other side of war.  Talking about the warriors among the Nephites, she has Chasen say, in her analogue to the Book of Omni:

There are young women who have been taken against their will, and no one will listen to them.  The other men think they should feel blessed that they were seen as beautiful by warriors, especially if those warriors die.  If they are with child afterward, they should be grateful for that as well, for they will bear the children of warriors.

The mothers of these warriors are also mistreated.  They are ignored at best and abused at worst.  What kind of man strikes at the face of his own mother?  Or worse, breaks a bone so that she will never walk properly again?  Is that courage, I ask you?  Is that what God expects of the men who will protect us? (104)

Chasen, who can see the dead as if they were alive, has a good deal more sympathy for the Lamanite warriors, who treat their wives and daughters better.  Some of them are willing to marry the Nephite women rejected by their own Nephite men, and settle into Limhi’s kingdom.  But Chasen continues in this vein of despair, concluding “The Christ may come to us in time, but it is hard to believe that we will be worthy of that visit, any of us” (105).

In “The Book of Hesha,” with which volume 1 ends, Harrison examines closely the stories of King Noah and King Limhi through the memories of Hesha, the wife of Limhi.  This book parallels the account in Mosiah of the people of Zeniff and his successors Noah and Limhi and paints perhaps the most convincing alternate history, even more so than “The Book of Valor,” which tells the story of Benjamin and his son Mosiah.  It is with Hesha that Harrison is most convincing, partly because the story is one of the most compelling in the entire Book of Mormon. But also because, as the wife of Limhi, Hesha sees at first-hand how power and privilege can lull her people, and her husband, and herself, into a kind of stupor, and how hard it is to regain humility and retain humanity.  Hesha tells the tale of escape not as Gideon would — “Behold the back pass, through the back wall, on the back side of the city” (Mosiah 22:6) — as if it were obvious to anyone with a brain, but rather as a carefully-planned and carefully-executed escape from guards who not only have lived with the people in the city, and who know the city as well as Gideon, and who like him are warriors, but also as men who have intermarried with the people they guard.

It is clear that Harrison has read the book she considers “an inspired work of fiction.” She says that when a friend asked her to write her book, “it was clear as soon as my friend had asked me to do this task that it wasn’t from her at all.  It was from a higher source” so “I knew what I had to do: drop everything and write this book” (vii).  And so it appears that she did.  It is a shame that I have to mention that the book could use a good editor because the minor defects an editor would have caught and corrected detracted from my enjoyment, kind of like gnats in the Swell in spring.  If you noted in the quotation from Saren above the glitch “you would see have seen the worth of your own soul,” you may experience that minor buzz of irritation; if not, then you will enjoy the book all the more.

But a far worse defect is that this is only volume 1.  It ends with the return of the people of Limhi to Zarahemla.  In volume 2, Harrison would get to re-imagine the sins and redemption of Alma and the sons of Mosiah and re-tell the story of the sons and their mission to the Lamanites, and of the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi, as well as of the contrast between the warlike Nephites and the converted Lamanites who appear at the end of the book of Helaman, from among whom Samuel the Lamanite comes to call the Nephites to repentance.  I can’t wait to see what Harrison does with that story.  Perhaps I won’t have to wait for long!