Joe C

One of the best books I have ever read. A masterpiece.

An excellent premise and compelling characters kept me reading and admittedly excited about the story. Ultimately, though, the book could have been 200 pages shorter without diminishing it in the slightest and that kept me from really enjoying it, as much as I wanted to.

A well-written memoir and a story worth telling. I struggled to enjoy the book as much as I felt it deserved, especially for the first 100 pages or so, where I wished Walls had constructed the book more as a novel and less as a memoir (although it certainly is closer to a novel than most memoirs).

I accidentally read this book. I pulled it off the shelf with zero context (and thankfully the standard academic library cover instead of the campy cover it apparently should have had) and read the first page. That first page still didn't help me know what the book was about exactly, but I loved it and wanted to read the rest.

After reading it, it's still a difficult book to categorize. It's perhaps best described as a travel memoir of a writer and fan of the Book of Mormon, trying to understand what it is to write a sacred text. As a practicing (but often skeptical) Latter-day Saint/Mormon, it was fascinating to see the Book of Mormon from an outside perspective. So rarely does anyone outside the faith tradition take the book seriously that it's easy to think the only ways to engage the book are as orthodox believer or incredulous critic. Steinberg is neither.

Often laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the first chapters, I enjoyed myself all the way through, even if the concluding chapters had less insight than the first half. All in all worth reading for any fans of the Book of Mormon.

Absolutely captivating from beginning to end. A well-crafted and well-researched story of a murder that simultaneously introduces readers to the history of the troubles and some of its most infamous characters.