Go In Beauty [Paperback]

Michael Fillerup (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2005

When Max and his wife, Melissa, come to the Navajo reservation in Arizona for a teaching job, nothing prepares them for the world they enter. Storms with hot winds, but no rain, blind travelers and coat everything in sand. At school, Max butts heads with the crusty principal, Miles Cavenaugh, and he makes powerful enemies when he uncovers a predator in the children’s midst. And at Church, where he is made branch president, Max finds powers outside the priesthood at work. When mysterious forces and tragedy take Max’s wife, then his daughter, fleeing the reservation appears to be the only escape.

But Max learns that the reservation holds the key to his past and future, and he can only face them by going back. After two broken marriages, Max returns to the reservation to teach his final three years before retirement. A rekindled friendship leads to a relationship and Max’s excommunication. During his period of excommunication, Max sees one of his old Navajo friends die of old age, and his mourning and remorse combine to help him repent of his sins. Late one Christmas Eve, he receives a call from a family looking for their Navajo exchange student, who has returned to the reservation without permission. Max heads up to the mesa in a blinding snowstorm, facing great peril and the final challenge of his life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A significant contribution to Mormon fiction, Fillerup’s Go In Beauty is remarkable for its fresh, fascinating vision of atonement. -- Richard Cracroft, BYU Magazine

About the Author

Michael Fillerup is the prize-winning author of numerous short stories, a short story collection Visions and Other Stories (1990), and a novel Beyond the River (1995). He has also written several children’s books and three screenplays; The Last Code-Talker, Go in Beauty, and The Man Who Bred Trojan Tailbacks. A California native, he attended Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Brigham Young University-Provo, and Arizona State University before moving to the Navajo Reservation in 1978 where he, his wife Rebecca, and four children lived for six years. He has directed two Navajo language revitalization programs and is the founder of Puente de Hozho, a tri-lingual school in Flagstaff, Arizona. He currently serves as the director of bilingual education for the Flagstaff Public Schools while teaching part-time for Northern Arizona University where he earned a doctorate degree in Education in 1996. He will spend the 2005-06 school year in Oaxaca, Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar/Lecturer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Palmyra Press (August 25, 2005)
• ISBN-10: 0975508016
• ISBN-13: 978-0975508015
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,668,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fillerup Fan, December 10, 2005

By 

Mormon Fiction Fan (Reno, Nevada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Go In Beauty (Paperback)

I've long been a fan of Fillerup's short stories published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and I especially enjoyed his collection "Visions and Other Stories," which as I recall was published some fifteen years or so ago. Fillerup, I think, is one of the most talented contemporary Mormon writers, and his stories are remarkable for their precisely wrought prose, their well-motivated characters, and their spiritual insight and maturity. Needless to say, I was excited to order and read his latest work, the first novel of his that I have read.

At this point, since I've generously praised Fillerup for his earlier writing, I suppose I should explain why I gave this work four stars instead of five. Though the novel is far better and more poignant than nearly any Mormon work I've read recently, I was slightly disappointed by the characterization in this novel. For some reason, Fillerup always keeps us a bit distant from his characters, never allowing us direct access to their thoughts or emotions or motivations. As a result the work seems always to move at the same real-time, slightly abstract pace, reminding me a bit of a highly descriptive script for a play. I wish Fillerup wouldn't hide his talent for narration and characterization that so was so evident in his earlier works, and to be honest, I can't quite figure why he decided to depart in stylistic approach from his earlier, highly successful, and well-respected stories. The approach employed here, it seems to me, distances the reader from the characters and robs them of one of the greatest benefits of novels vs. plays or TV or movies: namely, the ability of a reader to see the world directly through the eyes and thoughts of another person.

Now, having said that, I should say that Fillerup here is still better than nearly anyone else writing religious fiction these days, and this novel is definitely worth buying. If you haven't read Fillerup before, start with his earlier collection (listed above), if you can still find a copy, and then work your way into Go In Beauty. This is a wonderfully written and executed novel, but one that in my humble opinion could have been better if Fillerup would employ his remarkable skills of characterization and point-of-view narration more freely.

Ultimately: A great novel that doesn't quite live up to the high standard of Fillerup's earlier work, but is still better than the work of nearly any of the other Mormon writers I've read recently.