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Reviews 259 in national magazines such as Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, and Boys’Life. The foreword by Robert Roripaugh provides a literary introduction to the stories, while the introduction by Mary Alice Gunderson gives a portrait of Curry as a person, a writer, and a teacher. With each story, Gunderson delivers a brief introduction of pertinent background information. The stories range from romance stories (one that appeared in Gay Love, 1944, and one that appeared in Good Housekeeping, 1963) to young readers’ stories, Westerns, and mainstream stories. Some of the adolescent stories seem lightweight, as do the two romances, the story about the beatnik professor, and the story about the writer with a wounded heart. The best stories in this collection are about the ranch country of Wyoming and northern Colorado. Although some of these stories seem to have been plotted towards endings that would sell to the slick magazines, they give a real feeling for life lived as Curry knew it. Four of the ten ranch country stories merit individual mention. “The Brushoff” and “In the Silence,” the first and last stories in the collection, won Spur awards with the Western Writers ofAmerica. Two others, “Geranium House” and “Green Willow Growing,” are also poten­ tially moving stories, even if, as it seems, they were shaped for a market. In these four evocative stories at least, there should be something that touches nearly any reader. As Roripaugh mentions, Curry’s work holds importance to readers inter­ ested in Wyoming literature, literature of the West, and literature by women of our region. To me it seems that her work lies somewhere between the light, commercialized (but somewhat serious) fiction of early writers like Caroline Lockhart and B. M. Bower, and the serious literary fiction of current writers like Alice Munro and Louise Erdrich. The stories in this collection seem compa­ rable to the fiction of Dorothy Johnson and Mary O’Hara, whose fiction was contemporaneous with Curry’s. For the most part, these stories belong to that era, but it is very nice to have them available to today’s interested readers. JOHN D. NESBITT Eastern Wyoming College Breeding Leah and Other Stories. By John Bennion. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books Inc., 1991. 168 pages, $14.95.) While reading this collection of stories, I came to realize yet again the insidious depths of my own prejudices. These stories are about Mormons trying to survive in Mormon country. Having spent twenty-one years in Mormon country and finding myself treated rather shabbily, I was prepared to dismiss these stories as just so much sentimental gibberish. But as a literate westerner and publisher of a western literary magazine I must examine these stories as objectively as I can. And examine them, I have, with fascination. 260 Western American Literature Sex and procreation are the major themes in this collection, as they are in Mormon culture, and also as they exist in the “gentile myth”of Mormon culture as well. Young missionaries return home after months of sexual repression seeking wives for release; a lonely young widow living in rural isolation has an adulterous relationship with her married community protectorate; a young man quarrels with his wife and unsuccessfully seeks solace in the arms of an old girlfriend. These characters sound like a pretty common human lot to any sophisticated reader but there’s an additional dimension to these stories. Un­ derlying his characters’ humanity, Bennion weaves the web of Mormon dogma which smashes these characters against what they believe they should be feeling with what they really feel. The two most chilling and successful pieces in the book are “Dust” and “Jenny, Captured by the Mormons.” “Dust,” the lead story, tracks the disinte­ grating mind of a young man tortured with images of Armageddon in the Utah desert. This story’s style is intriguingly disjointed, mimicking the disturbed mind recounting this all too “true” tale of irresponsible military chemical and nuclear testing and its victims. “Jenny, Captured by the Mormons” allows us to enter the mad world of a young wife terrorized by her husband’s religious fanaticism. Her isolation and the blame inflicted upon her by those whosejob it is to...

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