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Title: could have been good
Review: As the PW review states, the book is riddled with factual errors--large and small. It is also full of the author's anti-religious and anti-Mormon prejudice; events and people are always cast in the dimmest light (except the author's own ancestor and family) and Denton seems unable to imagine a religious worldview. I would have like more direct quoting from Jean Rio Baker's journals and a more dispassionate point of view that accounted for the reason people of the 19th century were so compelled to leave their home countries to emigrate to Utah and take part in what Mormonism seemed to promise. I bought this book to get a sense--from Jean Rio Baker--of who she was and why she converted to Mormonism, but the factual errors and value judgments cloud the book's credibility so much that it did not really address those issues.
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