Jana's new novel, The Last Cowgirl, is set in the harsh and beautiful landscape of the West desert of Utah.
Recently returned to Salt Lake from Tucson Jana's memoir, Riding in the Shadows of Saints recently came out in paperback.
ISBN-13: 9780061257186 Availability: Out of Print Published: William Morrow, 01/01/2008
In a setting as harsh as the future she has laid out for herself, Dickie Sinfield must come to terms with her family, her past, and the choices she has made when her brother is killed from nerve gas poisoning out in the West desert of Utah. The great basin that stretches from the Wasatch to the Sierra Nevada Mountains offers little room for error and the people who work the land know it better that anyone. And try as she might to stay away, ultimately it's the land that offers Dickie a second chance at happiness.
ISBN-13: 9780307338570 Availability: On Our Shelves Now Published: Three Rivers Press, 07/01/2006
Between 1846 and 1866, about 50,000 Mormons traveled the Mormon trail, burying more than 6,000 of the faithful along the way. Four generations ago, seven of Jana Richman's eight great-great grandmothers walked all or part of the 1,300-mile trek, from Nauvoo, Illinois, on the Mississippi River to Salt Lake City. Traveling on faith and little else, they endured unfathomable hardships--bitter cold, extreme heat, mud, icy river crossings, blizzards, buffalo stampedes, disease, hunger, and exhaustion--never stopping until they reached their promised land where they could be free to practice a religion that few outsiders understood and many violently condemned.
One hundred and fifty years later, Jana Richman packs maps and a laptop computer on the back of a motorcycle and follows the route of her ancestors, searching for the peace and faith the women before her carried with so much confidence. Jana also searches for a clearer understanding of how her devoutly Mormon mother is able to reconcile an independent spirit and enormous inner strength with her intense belief in a patriarchal institution.
Riding into the nation's heartland, visiting graveyards, chatting with missionaries, and soaking in the rituals of the faith she so casually shrugged off as a teenager, Richman begins to unravel her family's mysteries and confront her own long-held prejudices about the Mormon Church.
