In 2014, Stacy Lynn Carroll was a Whitney Finalist in the General category with her novel, My Name is Bryan, based on her father-in-law’s experiences as a  spinal cord injury survivor. This year, she’s back with another finalist, Shattered Hearts, which is based on her family’s experience with pornography addiction. Shattered Hearts opens with Sarah Dunkin discovering that her husband has been dealing with work- and family-related pressures by looking at pornography online. She’s devastated and throws him out of the house, and book follows the couple over the course of the next year as they work to repair their relationship. Carroll treats pornography as a serious addiction, and humanizes both the men and women whose lives are affected by it. It takes a lot of guts to write about a subject with so much potential to shame, and I give Carroll a lot of props for that. The writing, at times, can be somewhat didactic, but I think that Shattered Hearts could be a huge comfort to someone going through a similar situation, and it was an eye-opener for me.

Chris Pendragon is a young history professor from Gonzaga, on a summer holiday in Wales, when he witnesses a devastating car accident and something strange happens when he and an elderly man try to save a young girl. Somehow, the girl is healed, and Chris seems to be responsible for her healing. The elderly man reveals that his powers as a healer have been transferred to Chris, and Chris is suddenly more powerful, more vulnerable, and more reluctant than he has ever been in his life. The Healer is a book about the power of spirituality, not from a Mormon perspective, but in some ways it doesn’t surprise me that a Mormon wrote the book. Luke calls Chris a “lapsed Methodist” (teaching at a Catholic school?), yet one critic I read notes that he does the things religious people do (like praying on his knees each night). All in all, the book has a nice blend of a quickly moving, compelling plot and mystical/spiritual elements. It felt somewhat like The DaVinci Code in that respect, and I expect that Luke will revisit Chris Pendragon in future tales– The Healer is a story that is just beginning to be told.

Lillian Linden should be the happiest person in the world. After surviving a horrific plane crash and living with the other survivor on a tropical island for several years, the pair was rescued and returned to their homes and families. But Lillian can’t get over the fact that her life is now one gigantic lie. She’s fallen into a depression and gained weight and is miserable. When a reporter asks to interview her, the secrets and lies she’s been holding inside about her time on the island threaten to tumble out and destroy her marriage and the perfect life she has been returned to. On the one hand, Wreckage was a much more tightly written, better edited book than the others in the general category. Although only one of the other finalists has overtly Mormon characters, this is the book with the most secular feel. However, I think that Lillian’s deep, dark secret (which I pegged very early on in the story) is one that most readers, especially secular readers, would be very forgiving of, considering the circumstances Lillian endured.

Bridget is thrilled to be hired, right out of grad school, to work as an archivist at a historic home in small-town Southern Utah. However, she soon finds herself falling in love (with a man and a young boy) and embroiled in some of the very conflicts from her past she was trying to escape. The McCarran Collection is a quick, engrossing read. Many of Adair’s books share the same Southern Utah setting, and she’s a master at making the reader feel a sense of place. I appreciated Bridget’s character, and her growing relationship with Diego, the young boy she takes care of. I felt that some of the more villainous characters were painted with broader strokes. All in all, a solid book.

In Tara Allred’s The Other Side of Quiet, Mrs. Childs is an English teacher at a Utah junior high, who assigns her creative writing class the task of writing in their  private journals each day. When a murder of a girl at the high school, she’s required by the principal and the police to read the journals. While this invasion of her students’ privacy at first seems to distance her from the students, the class eventually comes together through the investigation, and all of the students (and their teacher) learn and grow a lot in the process. The Other Side of Quiet is the kind of book I would have expected to love. I’m an English teacher and have worked at the junior high level and given assignments like this to my students. I appreciate the narrative strategies Allred employed (we heard from each student, for example, both in snippets from their journal and in a more straightforward narrative), but I also felt a little bit like the characters were more flat than round. The kids in the class were a troubled foster kid, a football player with a dissatisfied ex-NFL dad, a boy with two moms, a couple who have a teen pregnancy, and so on. It felt like a lot of after school specials wrapped up into one novel.