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Journey Home: Romantic Sparks Ignite Mediocre Novel

© Eric Jordan Jensen

Imagine this: A girl loses her mother at an early age. Her father cannot bear to leave her with a relative, so he takes her on the road with him as he travels the country working at odd jobs. After the girl is harassed in an all-male mining camp, the father decides to protect her by passing her off as a boy. She thus grows up in a confusing, but safe, environment, where she fails to learn anything about being a woman.

Now, picture this: The young girl loses her father to a freak accident. On his deathbed, her father asks a trustworthy man to escort her from their home in Alaska to an aunt's house in Salt Lake City, Utah. The father discloses that his child is actually a girl, but he fails to mention her true age. The man, an inactive Mormon, soon finds himself alone in a rickety pickup with a beautiful 20-year-old woman. Although she lacks the feminine graces of all the other women he knows, he finds himself falling in love with the beautiful orphan.

Consider the following: There is an eleven year age difference between the two. Also, the girl believes strongly in God and the LDS religion, while the man struggles with his forgotten faith. In addition, the man believes he must give the girl room to find herself and engage in the activities of a normal young woman; the girl interprets his stance as disinterest.

All of these issues come to a head in Jennie Hansen's romantic novel, Journey Home(1997). The book opens by introducing Allen James, a gifted photographer and inactive member of the LDS Church. Although he has distanced himself from the Church, Allen has kept himself chaste; still, he believes that he will never find a woman who really loves him. We also meet Holland, a young woman whose father dressed her as a boy to keep her safe in the rough camps in which he worked. When Holland's father dies in a logging accident, he entrusts Holland to the trustworthy Allen. However, he leads the photographer to believe that his daughter is a young girl who simply needs a surrogate father to take her to Utah. As the two travel, Allen soon realizes that not only is Holland not a little girl, but she is also a strikingly beautiful young woman. He soon finds himself falling in love with her despite their many differences. Allen fights his feelings all the way to Utah and beyond. Finally, he realizes that true love does exist for him, but he finds himself racing against time to make her understand. In his search for love, Allen finds himself re-committing to a forgotten religion and trusting in his own ability to love.

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