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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent story of coming of age, 2 Sep 2001
A Japanese fan, lying on a table, is a simple unassuming object. However, in the hands of a dancer it pivots and twirls, opening gradually or with a flick of a wrist to reveal itself as a work of art, a kaleidoscope of color and movement. As the dance develops the fan becomes more than an object in the hands of an artist. It is a gateway into a world both frightening in its strangeness and comforting in its familiarity. "This Is The Place", Carolyn Howard-Johnson's excellent first novel, unfurls as the fan does developing from a simple coming of age story, filled with the music of everyday life, into a powerful novel about the search for individuality and the struggle against prejudice. Skylar Eccles is the heroine. The daughter of a Mormon father and a Protestant mother, she must struggle against the demands and prejudices of both sides of her family that mandate that she conforms to their religious views. She must also struggle against the constrains placed on members of her sex in 1950's Utha, that sent the message that "only in marriage would a woman be a complete entity." Even the love of a good man and the love of her family threatened to destroy her selfhood through the obstacles placed in her path in their attempts to mold and shape her into good wife, obedient daughter, and a child of the faith. The pain of intolerance and the fight against bigotry is reflected in the lives of Skylar's great-grandmother Crystal and grandmother Harriet, who both gave up their more comfortable religions to embrace the harsher rules of Mormonism, in order to be with the men they loved. It is also mirrored in the life of Skylar's mother Stella, who refuses to relinquish her own faith. Beneath all this emerges another story. It is the story of Utah, the fifth woman in this tale. Utah is the mother, loving, comforting, and judgmental. Enfolding these women in her arms, she shapes and forms them in her own image, strong and glorious in her harsh, uncompromising beauty that demands respect and honor from her sons and daughters. Howard-Johnson's language is vivid and vibrant, pulsating with the music and beauty of the land she describes, burnt sienna, pumpkin and amber. Her words, like the music that pours from grandma Harriet's piano, ties our souls to "the rhythm of life in Utah's Mormon community." But, it is Howard-Johnson's power as a story teller that holds the readers enthralled bringing to life characters that spoke directly to us of their hopes and joys. She not only held my interest until the end, but she made me fall in love with Utah a land whose harsh and vivid beauty effects the lives not only of the people who live there but also impacts those who merely visit it at one moment in time in the pages of a book
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