Recently my good friend Heather (H. B.) Moore received a rather scathing review of one of her books. Apparently the reviewer had bought the audio version  and had it playing in the car during a family trip. She was horrified at the content, which she found offensive, and turned it off because her small children were in the car and shouldn't have been exposed to something that deserved a PG-13 rating. (And what, pray tell, she demanded, was such a thing doing on the shelves of an LDS bookstore?)

This from a book published by pretty darn conservative Covenant Communications. More...

Last week a Deseret News reporters interviewed me about Band of Sisters and the Flat Daddy Project. I've done several interviews recently, but this particular reporter asked something no one had yet.

I’m admitting upfront that I’m stealing this topic from J. Scott Bronson. His last post was titled, “There’s Always a Message,” and it struck a chord with me.

Back in my early teenage years, my older sister, then an English major, and I got into a friendly discussion/argument about whether a story could exist on its own without an underlying message.

I was firmly in the camp that yes, of course it could. Not everything is a fable or must end with a moral. Not every writer pens a story just to teach a lesson. Puh-leese. My sister disagreed, saying that every story has something to say and teach. At the time, I was too immature to get what she was saying.

Many, many years later, after my first novel came out, this same sister came to me after reading it. She had a bit of an, “I told you so” grin on her face. I had no idea what she was about to say. What came out stunned me.

“Your book has messages and themes and symbols.”

It . . . what?

She complimented me on how well I’d incorporated a particular theme into the narrative, teaching the reader a certain lesson. “Told ya,” she said.

I never did admit that I hadn’t meant to weave any theme or symbol into the book. After she pointed it out, I looked back and thought, “Cool. That’s actually kinda neat.” But I didn’t put it there on purpose. (That was 2002. I have yet to tell her.)

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I’ll be the first to admit that the body of literature written by Latter-day Saints hasn’t yet reached the classic prophecy of Orson F. Whitney that we’d have “Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”

On the other hand, we’ve come a long, long way in the past few decades. I’d say that even in the last five years, the quality of LDS literature had grown by leaps and bounds. Sure, there’s still plenty of cheese on the shelves in all its varieties of cheddar and its cousins. You’ll still find less-than stellar writing, luck-luster editing, and otherwise low-quality books.

BUT (and that’s a big, enormous, but), a lot of good books are getting published, and they aren’t just from obscure, independent, “literary” publishers. Great genre novels—from mystery to romance to historical and more—are hitting shelves regularly. Each year the odds drop of picking up an LDS-authored book and finding it to be a totally lame conversion story that’s so poorly written it makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out.

I’m sure the reasons behind the increase in quality are numerous, but I attribute much of it to a couple of things. More...