Endorsements
For Reviews, click here.
Braden Bell hits a bull’s eye with his “Road Show.” Learning more about the wonder of atoning forgiveness, you will laugh and cry as you see yourself and loved ones in the remarkably fleshed out characters of this wonderful book. A MUST read!
Michael Ballam, General Director, Utah Festival Opera Company
Michael Ballam, General Director, Utah Festival Opera Company
What a wonderful book! Our hearts have been touched. No one could read this story without feeling the depth of the Savior's love for all His children. Thank you for such an insightful, compelling, spiritual journey.
Gary and Joy Lundberg, authors of I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better, Love That Lasts, and Meeting Amazing Grace
Gary and Joy Lundberg, authors of I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better, Love That Lasts, and Meeting Amazing Grace
Through clever dialogue and scenes that ring with truth, Braden Bell grapples with the way a community of imperfect people may experience the atonement of Christ through the give and take of working together. He deals not only with healing through participation, but wrestles with some of our most pressing modern problems such as depression or addiction to pornography. The book deserves reading and rereading.
Award-winning novelist Marilyn Brown, Founder of the Marilyn Brown Novel Award, UVU.
Award-winning novelist Marilyn Brown, Founder of the Marilyn Brown Novel Award, UVU.
In The Road Show, Bell gracefully captures the lives of five members of the Church, each with their own struggles of faith and worthiness, to skillfully weave them into a montage centered upon the Savior. Bell is an observer of human nature and has a deft hand for nuance, voice, and characterization. Scott Horn, the protagonist, is a theater student, caught in a painful struggle with pornography. Feelings of unworthiness envelop Scott as he reluctantly accepts a calling to direct a road show for his ward. While his academic career is on the line, he is drawn back to life as he develops a powerful script, complete with original music lyrics, a message of joy and hope that heals the cast members as they attend rehearsals. An extraordinary book about the redemptive power of Christ in the lives of ordinary people. I couldn’t put it down.
Sirpa Grierson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Brigham Young University
Sirpa Grierson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Brigham Young University
I enjoyed being caught up in this story. Not only does it explore the powers, challenges, and delights of dramatic art--there are other learnings that await the reader. This book is well worth the time of both youth and adults."
Wayne E. Brickey, author and columnist
Wayne E. Brickey, author and columnist
Gripping – Powerful – An instant classic – a “can’t-put-it-down” odyssey into the very fiber of the troubled soul - and the process by which it can be healed.
Braden Bell’s book provides a rare and personal glimpse into the heart of the struggling Latter-day Saint. His characters, compassionately and convincingly drawn, include - the depressed housewife, the self-loathing pornography addict, the self-righteous church leader, the lonely misfit. He describes the customized journey of each of these characters - from despair to hope, from alienation to connection, from brokenness to healing.
Often in our culture, we have come to regard emotional healing as a chemical victory, engineered by medical science. Yet, as the book so effectively illustrates, there is a much deeper and more comprehensive healing process available. It transforms the very thoughts, feelings, attitudes, habits, and everyday lifestyles of individuals and families in pain. This healing process is most complete - and most permanent - when it is centered in the simple truths and powers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In an age of so many counterfeit cures and self-appointed experts, Bell’s book is a stunning reminder of the gentle but profound healing power of the “Wonderful Counselor” Isaiah prophesied of (Isaiah 9:6). It bears resplendent testimony that His power to heal continues to be mercifully extended in our day - and that it directly applies to these less tangible but ever-more-common afflictions of the heart, mind, and spirit.
Carrie Maxwell Wrigley, LCSW – counselor and teacher, “Christ-Centered Healing from Depression and Low Self Worth”
Braden Bell’s book provides a rare and personal glimpse into the heart of the struggling Latter-day Saint. His characters, compassionately and convincingly drawn, include - the depressed housewife, the self-loathing pornography addict, the self-righteous church leader, the lonely misfit. He describes the customized journey of each of these characters - from despair to hope, from alienation to connection, from brokenness to healing.
Often in our culture, we have come to regard emotional healing as a chemical victory, engineered by medical science. Yet, as the book so effectively illustrates, there is a much deeper and more comprehensive healing process available. It transforms the very thoughts, feelings, attitudes, habits, and everyday lifestyles of individuals and families in pain. This healing process is most complete - and most permanent - when it is centered in the simple truths and powers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In an age of so many counterfeit cures and self-appointed experts, Bell’s book is a stunning reminder of the gentle but profound healing power of the “Wonderful Counselor” Isaiah prophesied of (Isaiah 9:6). It bears resplendent testimony that His power to heal continues to be mercifully extended in our day - and that it directly applies to these less tangible but ever-more-common afflictions of the heart, mind, and spirit.
Carrie Maxwell Wrigley, LCSW – counselor and teacher, “Christ-Centered Healing from Depression and Low Self Worth”
Braden Bell’s The Road Show is the story of an aggregate of broken souls in a ward on the frontiers of the American church. Some struggle with sin and self-loathing, some with depression and despair, others with the loneliness of isolation. These damaged souls are brought into relief against the waves and eddies of a community that doesn’t see them, and which they do not see. They are brought together, a motley bunch, in an earnest and innovative road show production, and enact their own redemption in a spiritual outpouring that changes them and the people around them. The uniqueness of the novel is its conceit that theatre—and by extension the arts—are effective spaces for revelation, worship, and the work of ministry. It is, in short, a story of congregation at its best—of the healing and help that we experience when we learn to see each other, and thus ourselves, through God’s eyes.
Its weaknesses are few and forgivable. It is an LDS novel, and is thus somewhat predictable in its narrative arc. It must be comic, in the Greek sense: we expect that things will turn out, and they do. But the denouement is open-ended, fragile, movingly steeped in a sobbing, miraculous energy that we know pours, ebbs, trickles, and pours again in turns. It is an LDS novel, and while the characters are differentiated in voice, the language, even the language of sin and doubt, is clean-cut, confined to a Sunday School vocabulary, safe for consumption.
In a less authentic effort, this would feel evasive or weak, but Bell, a bishop as well as an actor, director, and teacher of theatre with a PhD from NYU, deliberately refuses to sully the narrative with the mere trappings or symptoms of darkness. The darkness he explores is that of the soul in pain and despair, clinging to the remnants of faith and hope, and finding them strengthened in prayer and community. It is a darkness diffused by light and joy."The author is stage-savvy, and it shows.
This is a Spartan novel, light on details, but each scene is easily seen in the mind’s eye, close up, drawn in on the faces and the turmoils of the characters. And the novel is moving—funny, honest, clearsighted, hopeful—but mostly moving, written about keening hearts with a bishop’s keen sympathy and an artist’s keen eye.
The show itself is startling for its artistry, and the novel, with a few exceptional passages that overreach, is written for the visual imagination, Spartan, focused, untroubled by the garrulous style of most freshman authors. The story isn’t over-populated: the ward and stake are implicit, a kind of organic milieu of personalities we sense and recognize through throwaway observations: types familiar and fond. Minor characters are given space as more than foils: they actuate much of the progress the principals make, and they also show us how both damage and restoration ripple out—that selves, families, and communities alike suffer, and alike need healing.
A cynical reader will find that healing a little too pat, a little contrived. I would have hoped that, even though Bell allows for the fragility of the spirit, he might have left one or two wounded souls wandering in the dark. This, too, is a forgivable problem, and perhaps an inevitable one: such compressions of action, such intensities of movement are staples of storytelling, and it is always easier to write about pain and darkness than it is to write convincingly about healing and light. The redemption we seek can feel a little fantastic at times, the light wan and diffuse—but this is because we are accustomed to telestial shadows. The cycles of sin and depression, the keening, can be tiresome, but that, too, is naturalistic: these are old crises we’re encountering at high tide: the rolling is metronomic, familiar, and normal. That the monotony of what keeps us from God’s love can be broken is precisely the point. When God breaks through, our clarity of vision feels dreamy, surreal. But it is the realest thing there is. And it is precisely the joy of redemption that preoccupies Bell and his readers in the end: yes, that joy may be fragile, perhaps fleeting, but it is also momentous, awesome, and total as long as it lasts. And it promises to come again.
Jonathon Penny, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English Literature, United Arab Emirates University
Its weaknesses are few and forgivable. It is an LDS novel, and is thus somewhat predictable in its narrative arc. It must be comic, in the Greek sense: we expect that things will turn out, and they do. But the denouement is open-ended, fragile, movingly steeped in a sobbing, miraculous energy that we know pours, ebbs, trickles, and pours again in turns. It is an LDS novel, and while the characters are differentiated in voice, the language, even the language of sin and doubt, is clean-cut, confined to a Sunday School vocabulary, safe for consumption.
In a less authentic effort, this would feel evasive or weak, but Bell, a bishop as well as an actor, director, and teacher of theatre with a PhD from NYU, deliberately refuses to sully the narrative with the mere trappings or symptoms of darkness. The darkness he explores is that of the soul in pain and despair, clinging to the remnants of faith and hope, and finding them strengthened in prayer and community. It is a darkness diffused by light and joy."The author is stage-savvy, and it shows.
This is a Spartan novel, light on details, but each scene is easily seen in the mind’s eye, close up, drawn in on the faces and the turmoils of the characters. And the novel is moving—funny, honest, clearsighted, hopeful—but mostly moving, written about keening hearts with a bishop’s keen sympathy and an artist’s keen eye.
The show itself is startling for its artistry, and the novel, with a few exceptional passages that overreach, is written for the visual imagination, Spartan, focused, untroubled by the garrulous style of most freshman authors. The story isn’t over-populated: the ward and stake are implicit, a kind of organic milieu of personalities we sense and recognize through throwaway observations: types familiar and fond. Minor characters are given space as more than foils: they actuate much of the progress the principals make, and they also show us how both damage and restoration ripple out—that selves, families, and communities alike suffer, and alike need healing.
A cynical reader will find that healing a little too pat, a little contrived. I would have hoped that, even though Bell allows for the fragility of the spirit, he might have left one or two wounded souls wandering in the dark. This, too, is a forgivable problem, and perhaps an inevitable one: such compressions of action, such intensities of movement are staples of storytelling, and it is always easier to write about pain and darkness than it is to write convincingly about healing and light. The redemption we seek can feel a little fantastic at times, the light wan and diffuse—but this is because we are accustomed to telestial shadows. The cycles of sin and depression, the keening, can be tiresome, but that, too, is naturalistic: these are old crises we’re encountering at high tide: the rolling is metronomic, familiar, and normal. That the monotony of what keeps us from God’s love can be broken is precisely the point. When God breaks through, our clarity of vision feels dreamy, surreal. But it is the realest thing there is. And it is precisely the joy of redemption that preoccupies Bell and his readers in the end: yes, that joy may be fragile, perhaps fleeting, but it is also momentous, awesome, and total as long as it lasts. And it promises to come again.
Jonathon Penny, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English Literature, United Arab Emirates University
