Today, we cringe over the obvious racist undertones of some of this stuff, but Gloria was industrious, hard working, simple, did not really get consumed with revenge, and endured to the end. Ultimately, nothing she did was ever about selfishness, but always about others, and their happiness and welfare. If you are trying to encourage that kind of behavior in your readership, then this makes total sense.

My problem is that I am too much of a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and can’t help myself sometimes when something is so over the top out there. This story ended well, but the path to get there had more twists and bad smells than the London sewers. However, any time you want to throw up a Sister Stone Serial, I am so there.

I enjoyed this serial as well, more than her other one (remember all the irritatingly noble souls stumbling through their misguided lovesick behavior in the South Pacific?) because it was a straightforward and engaging report of what life was like for this small group of people. Gloria was noble enough in sensible ways, at least, they made sense to me. It was easy to forgive the obvious ploys, like the diamonds in the gourds, in order to see the real surprises in the behavior of her characters, against the backdrop of daily life in Deseret that she created, and showed us small, ordinary things that I found interesting and noteworthy. Dare I make a list? The tasks that Gloria learned to do to make life bearable and comfortable, the almost unquestioned authority that husbands had over wives and children, the detailed descriptions of way she ran her household, and the things she provided that each member cherished, and how they reacted when those things were denied them. The surprising choices by the characters that twisted the narrative about, choices that were more often not admirable.

It’s not Nobel Prize material, but it worked for the editors and readers of the Era, and it hooked me in.

There’s a whole range of stories and poetry and plays in our history that I’m happy to post here. I think it adds something to our awareness of what it meant to be a Mormon in, in this case, the 1930s when we look at what they were reading. We can evaluate it according to our own sensibilities … and maybe, with effort, we can also step into the world of our ancestors just a little bit by trying to read through their eyes.

Now I am going to read the rest tonight at home!

THANKS Ardis for finding good stories and serializing them.

It felt to me like she just got tired of writing — it’s got to be at least as tedious writing this as it does reading it, right?

It felt like she just kind of got to the point of “here’s a list of nouns I’d kinda like to say something about, but it’s just too much work to supply verbs, objects, and all those other grammatical doodads to go with them.”

Overall, the writing in this part seemed a lot more like a collection of random sentences than a narrative. Like “She never lost a tooth.” Where the heck did that come from?

Ah, well. At least it’s over.

And I have an odd craving for clotted cream. And palindromes.