Customer Reviews

Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman's Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail

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2 star:		(1)
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This is a beautifully written book. In lucid and often lyrical prose the author describes her journey along the Mormon trail by motorcycle, following the route from Nauvoo, Illinois to Salt Lake City taken by several of her female ancestors and, on the way, recounts brief histories of their determination and faith in spite of horrendous obstacles. In parallel, she delves into her own struggle with Mormonism and arrives at a deeper understanding, and a redefinition, of her own faith. As the daughter of a deeply believing Mormon mother and a renegade father ("a jack Mormon") she has a lot to contend with. Her motorcycle becomes the symbol as well as the carrier of her uncertainty.

There is enough Mormon history provided to satisfy the casual reader, but the most heartening aspect of her presentation is that it doesn't fall along the usual polarizing lines: Ms. Richman offers both praise and criticism of the Mormon hierarchy and its leaders. The stories of her female ancestors along the trail are often heart-stopping in the intensity of their suffering and the depth of their faith. The book is filled with good writing and acute insights into many of the people she meets along the way.

The book left me wanting more. For one thing, by the end her situation is much like her father's - she recognizes how strongly tied she is to Mormonism, though she will never rejoin the church. I wanted the book to provide more insight into her father's character and attitudes as a way of understanding her own.

For another, throughout the book her husband (who stays home in Tucson) is described as a perfect man, loving, kind, thoughtful, supportive, insightful - almost too much to believe. At the end of the book they separate, but her only explanation is a bit of hand-waving: there are "philosophical" differences. If he was such a great guy, couldn't he make the changes needed to move with her to Utah? And what are these differences? I'd like to know more about them as a way of understanding her own changes. Perhaps that's another book.

For me, the attempt to make her own journey feel as dramatic and harsh as that of the original Saints doesn't ring true. Where her great-great-grandmothers starved, bled and buried children in the snow, the worst she has to contend with are a balky cycle and sadistic truckers. Most nights she finds a hot shower and a warm bed.

The spiritual summation in Chapter 21 is a bit talky but effective. She arrives at an idea of faith which comes close to the idea of practice as taught in various forms of Buddhism; and I'd like to see her explore that connection further. Perhaps that too, will come in another book.

As a woman rider, it is very difficult to find any books that deal with why we ride, as well as how we ride. This book was not only interesting from the riding angle, the Mormon Historical view was really good and should be geared at anyone that was raised in the Mormon faith, yet drifted away for various reasons. The chapters dealing with riding on & immediately after Sept 11th defined the sense that we are cast in a situation that no person since the Pearl Harbor days understands. Read this not only for journey, but keep it to read again this winter. (review written by Bobbie Tyler)

If you're mormon, post mormon, motorcycle enthusiast, westerner, feminist, post feminist, or a reader who just likes a good story, then you'll enjoy this book.

Richman writes truthfully about her experience as a new Mormon pioneer - paving her way out of rather than into the Mormon Church. She parallels her solo motorcycle trip from Nauvoo, IL to Salt Lake during the fall of 2001 with the faithful (and fateful) journey her decedents who traveled the Mormon Trail 150 years earlier.

The motorcycle metaphors may tire some, but I thought they added to the story. On the whole it is a good story. I felt a connection to her sense of pride in the pioneering spirit of her family side-by-side with her inability to live with such unquestioning faith.

As a former Mormon, I found this book fascinating. The author's experiences mirror many of my own. She has a more compassionate attitude towards Mormons than I do, which is a good thing. It was also fun to experience her motorcycling adventures from the safety of my four walls.

Jana Richman's memoir is an emotional and witty exploration of faith, history, family, and geography. As she rides her BMW from St. Louis to Utah, following the Mormon Trail pioneered by seven of her eight great-great grandmothers, she seamlessly moves from strand to strand: the story of her road trip, her yearning to understand her own rejection of the faith held dear by her mother, and sufficient historical background about the Trail and the Mormon Church to make sense of her journey. It sounds like a lot to pull off, but she does so with verve.

More novelist than historian, Richman nonetheless has done her research. She quotes from the journals of three of those great-great-grandmothers. She retells the history of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as she traces the line of that history across the continent. And every time she needs a pithy quote to sum up the experience of those who walked the trail, of the greater historical meaning of the Mormon Exodus, she finds that quote in Wallace Stegner's The Gathering of Zion.

Stegner would smile. Here is a smart Mormon woman, writing her way into her past and her very identity, and she finds her best guide in this non-Mormon historian and his book from four decades ago. Richman quotes Stegner on the Mormon handcart companies, in his words the "marathon walk" that was "the true climax of the Gathering, and the harshest testing of both people and organization." Her very next line: "Maybe I'm looking for the twenty-first-century version of `the harshest testing.'"

Richman's intimate experience of the immigrant trail moved me. On her motorcycle trip, she touches that history--the history of her own family--and brings it to life. History matters to her. These old stories illuminate her personal journey into the nature of faith in a way that lights up that journey for the reader, as well.

I was disappointed with this book beginning with the first paragraph. The author immediately showed us she was overwhelmed by her bike and the prospect of her traveling without a repair man. This continued throughout the book. There was more talk of her fear of parking on gravel or parking in the wrong direction on a slight slant than there was riding. The rest of the ride chatter was about fear of traffic and uncharacteristically, her fondness for riding in the rain. There was only one paragraph that I thought the author was happier to be on a bike than in a car. She wrote of riding down one country road and enjoying the ride.

She didn't even speak well of the interactions she had with most people who approached her only because she was on a bike. (I would have thought this might have been a good reason for not traveling by car.) She relayed self interpreted hostility and mostly the worry expressed by her mother and the people she met on the road. This was probably because worry consumed her during the ride.

Having traveled some parts of the Mormon Trail myself, I found her account to be minimal and lacking in the beauty and fascinating history that I saw in some of the very same places she wrote about. Many of the interesting places I saw were skipped over in her journey or at least her writing.

Unfortunately, the main theme of this book was not a motorcycle trip and not even a historical pilgrimage following the footsteps of her ancestors. The book is primarily a Mother's Day card written to make up to the author's mother that she is no longer involved in the Mormon Church. It gets regretfully sappy. The author seemed to have come to a resolution with her mother's disappointment in her, but we were not privy to any real conclusion, even if we cared.

Of course it's self-absorbed, it's a memoir! And bitterness can be hard-earned and an illuminating step towards peace. What is distracting to the point of being impossible to overlook is Richman's surprisingly vicious intolerance of people she personally disapproves of. Without that this would have been merely another Story-of-My-Personal-Journey, possibly inspiring to those who stand in the same place. And, to be fair, if you are also annoyed or intolerant, and not too demanding a literary critic, you might be inspired.
Richman's ascribing her own attitudes to her ancestors - potentially tender and enlightening - is ruined because of her heavy-handedness and insistence in cramming those masks on their faces. She is so proprietary about her pioneers that she "wanted to slap" the young missionary at one visitor's center, specifically for smiling too much and being too sweet, but more to the point, for having an obviously invalid point of view.
Incidentally, do yourself a favor and don't make assumptions about what group I belong to. I guarantee you'd be wrong - you don't have to be a target to resent people who take pot-shots.