Reviewed by Jenny Larson

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Wednesday, May. 7, 2008
"Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys," by Janet Kay Jensen, Cedar Fort, 314 pages, $15.99

"Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys," by Janet Kay Jensen, is a story of an unconditional love complicated by differences in culture and tradition. Although Andy McBride and Louisa Martin have similar values, it is a love that just can't seem to work.

Martin is polygamous and McBride is LDS, yet the two find a friendship neither expected – especially Martin, who grew up thinking she would one day become one of many wives to one man.

Jensen goes back and forth between telling the story of Martin and McBride as they fall in love in medical school and today as they struggle going about their everyday lives trying to forget about a love that cannot be. McBride takes a position in a small Kentucky town as the town doctor, and Martin heads back to Gabriel's Landing, Utah, to open a clinic to bring better health care to her people.

From Eliza the service dog, Smokey the quirky horse who does what she wants, to an old-fashioned Kentucky hills healer Miss Carolina and Joshua, a father who truly loves, Jensen brings to life some wonderfully colorful and endearing characters whom you can't help but love.

A simple love story told in a complicated time amid prejudices and ignorance between those who believe and those who don't, "Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys" is poignant in its subject and heart-wrenching in its reality.  

Readers will laugh as McBride makes his way around a funny little town full of funny little people full of charity, curiosity and even vengeance. And readers will cry as Martin faces old hard-fought traditions that won't let her be an independent woman of intelligence and talent as she fights the Council of Brothers about marriage and protects some of the young mothers against abusive husbands. Martin's redeeming grace is  her father Joshua, who defies the Council of Brothers and refuses to make her marry someone she does not love.

Choices are made and traditions followed, but what seems to be the right choice for Martin may just end up keeping her from true happiness.

"Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys" is a first novel for Jensen, and a sequel called "Zina" will be released soon.

"Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys" was most recently announced as a finalist in the Fiction & Literature: Religious Fiction of the National Best Books 2007 Awards. She was also a finalist in Forward Magazine's Book of the Year Award for the religious fiction category as well as a finalist in the USA Best Books of 2007 in the religious fiction category.

Not new to writing, Jensen enjoys writing short stories and essays and a little poetry here and there. Her next project is called "O'Connor's Honor."

On her Web site, Jensen writes that "O'Connor's Honor" is about Ian O'Connor, an impulsive, witty Irish professor of English literature with a past he can't remember, and Angela Hoover, a Boston physician and descendant of the Mayflower Company who falls into his arms from a second-story fire escape. The unlikely introduction is the beginning of an unusual friendship, which leads them into a dangerous trap.


Stay tuned next week as I speak with author Janet Kay Jensen about "Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys" and her upcoming projects. If there are any questions readers would like to ask Janet, please send an e-mail to jlarson@desnews.com.

For more information about "Don't You Marry The Mormon Boys" or "O'Connor's Honor,"  visit www.janetjensen.com.