Corry Anthon, athletic and playful, has come on a mission with just enough of a testimony to make him ill at ease. Phil Jeppsen, an Australian convert and former vagabond, welcomes the MTC's discipline—it's his companions he has problems with. Good-natured, bumbling Harvey Wilberg, who has put off a mission, torments the others with his childish jokes yet also has a childlike heart. Malan Rignell, a rancher's son, is quietly witty and clumsy in company, but no one guesses his strong self-doubt or his talent as a peacemaker.
This goundbreaking novel—thoughtful, realistic, spiritual—show-cases the experiences shared, but rarely documented, by tens of thousands of LDS youth. Parkinson captures life in the MTC, a place "set apart" from the world, by exploring the backgrounds and conversions of characters who are all the more compelling for being human, which is to say less than perfect, more like us.
LDS readers have long awaited fiction this intelligent, this rich, this true and broad-ranging in its depiction of spiritual struggle. [from back cover]