Angel of the Danube: Barry Monroe's Missionary Journal

Mitchell does seem to capture the essence of a Mormon mission--the conflicts, the irritations, and the deep feelings. I was convulsing with some of the humor and moved by the deeper parts. It was a good read and might help someone understand a little about what a Mormon missionary experiences.

A unusual, often startling but wonderfully refreshing Mormon missionary novel. Angel, which promises to be to Mormon missionary fiction what God's Army is to the Mormon missionary film, is a moving and comical account of a young man's successful search for spiritual wholeness amidst an (Austrian) world of rejection. Tracking Elder Barry Monroe's spiritual odyssey through the Austria Vienna Mission is something like tracking Huckleberry Finn's discovery of his and Jim's humanhood, and even more like following Henderson on his comic journey into the heart of Africa in Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. In fact, in Alan Mitchell we may have discovered our Mormon Saul Bellow. Writing his missionary journal in California-hip dialect (Mark Twain did it almost as well in Huck Finn), Elder Monroe, who calls everyone "Dude," is wacky and comical and essentially serious as he stands atop his bedrock Mormonness and calls the nonplused Austrians to repentance. Writing from what is obviously his own sound faith in the power of the gospel to change and improve lives, Mitchell has hung a rich and literarily satisfying coming-of-age novel upon an infrastructure of Austrian folklore and the ups-and-downs of Mormon missionary life. The result is a landmark novel unique in Mormon fiction that will delight everyone-except, perhaps, the Church Missionary Committee (Angel of the Danube will not become a supplement to the white Missionary Handbook). The rest of us will enjoy this fresh, original, thoroughgoingly Mormon, albeit wonderfully unorthodox treatment of the First Principles' pattern of the journey to belief. Hurrah for Alan Mitchell's rich contribution to Mormon letters and positive and affirming answer to the question: "what is left to be said, in fiction, about the life of a Mormon missionary!"Richard H. Cracroft Nan Osmond Grass Professor in English Brigham Young University

There were sections when the unabashed humor had me tittering like a schoolgirl. And there were sections that had me squirming, recalling what it was like to think and speak and act like a teenager. Mitchell has done a superb job conjuring the mood and scenery of Austria, along with the language and the people. He's also done a masterful job depicting the moral clashes that come from young men, unwilling to surrender their youthful playfullness, struggling to remain true to the rigid set of rules they have sworn to live by.