Review
Title: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage
Author: Rachel Rueckert
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 978-1948218627
Price: Hardback, $31.49; Paperback, $12.95
Reviewed by Scott Hales, January 2023
East Winds is the current Mormon lit “it” book. I started it reluctantly. Marriage is a big deal in Mormonism, so a Mormon memoir about marriage did not sound terribly novel to me. But I am a huge fan of travel memoirs, and there aren’t, to my knowledge, many non-mission-related Mormon travel memoirs out there. (Can you think of any that aren’t from the 19th century?)
This one has a rocky start. The narrative breezes through the South American leg of Rueckert’s journey, spending more time on her backstory than on her experiences in Colombia and Peru. This backstory is vital to the broader narrative and its themes, of course, and Rueckert narrates it well. But readers are left to wonder how her South American travels are relevant to her global quest.
This narrative sharpens, though, as Rueckert and her husband go to Asia and engage more with the peoples and marriage cultures of Thailand and India. For me, the book begins when Rueckert no longer has to juggle backstory with present action. Once the book becomes an actual global quest to reckon with marriage, it takes off.
For me, the best part of the book is Rueckert’s account of her and her husband’s experience on the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain, which contains—I’m going to say it—some of the best writing in recent Mormon literature. Rueckert is a terrifically vivid storyteller who excels at making even minor characters memorable—a hallmark of great travel writing.
Scott asks, “Are there non-mission-related Mormon travel memoirs out there? (Not from the 19th century)”
I haven’t read it, but Phyliis Barber’s third memoir, “To the Mountain: One Mormon Woman’s Search for Spirit” (2014), about her return to Mormonism, apparently includes a lot of travel writing. Blurb: “Her journey begins in the 1990s. In search of spiritual healing and a deeper understanding of the divine, she travels widely and participates with people of many different persuasions, including Southern Baptists; Tibetan Buddhist monks in Tibet and North India; shamans in Peru and Ecuador; goddess worshipers in the Yucatan; and members of mega-church congregations, an Islamic society, and Gurdjieff study groups. Her 20-year hiatus from Mormonism transforms her in powerful ways. A much different human being when she decides to return to her original religion, her clarity and unflinching honesty will encourage others to continue with their own personal odysseys.” https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Mormon-Womans-Search-Spirit/dp/0835609243
Also, the playwright Erik Orton and his wife Emily wrote a book about their large New. York family spending a year on a boat, traveling around the Atlantic. https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Sea-Convention-Life-changing-Sailboat/dp/162972551X