2005  AML Award: Marilyn Brown Novel Award

Presented to:
Arianne B. Cope

For:
The Coming of Elijah

This year's $1000 Marilyn Brown Novel Award goes to a new writer, Arianne B. Cope, for her work, The Coming of Elijah. This ambitious and moving novel might be termed a feminine answer to Brady Udall's story of a boy in the Indian Placement program, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.

This novel might seem ungainly in its ambition to chronicle nearly five decades in the lives of a Native American woman and her daughter; yet none of the judges would urge the writer to take on anything less than this large arc of history and these often painfully mixed and complicated characters, Anglo and Navajo.

The work has real gravity, and is bracingly--or even scorchingly--unsparing in its attention to the sheer awfulness and sense of deep cultural and spiritual betrayal, and despair, in the life of a Navajo-Anglo working-class family in happy Utah Valley through the last five decades, and to the larger problems that the story of such a family reveals for a church that has aspired to enlighten the lives of people of all ethnicities.

The story looks hard at the gulf between Elder Kimball's high hopes and glowing reports on the Placement Program and actual cross-cultural reality; and a reader may wonder why, since the excommunication and disgrace of George P. Lee, the Church has been so silent about this phase of its 20th Century history.

It may be hard for the writer to revise this book into a novel that doesn't seem to have an ecclesiastical-political agenda, and yet, as books like N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Melanie Rae Thon's Sweet Hearts demonstrate, it both can and should be done.