The Work and the Glory 9: All is Well by Gerald N. Lund

This is the LAST book in the Work and the Glory series--I wanted to finish this series before the baby came, and it worked out that I did! I feel like I've learned a lot about Church history, and gained a lot of perspective about our modern-day trials as compared to those of the pioneers. (For example, in this time of the pandemic, it was eye-opening to remember how much sickness and epidemics played a part in their lives at that time, and how so many people died from disease back then before they knew how to treat them. We are spoiled these days compared to them. Dealing with disease is a part of the human experience, one that we have kind of forgotten about thanks to our modern medicine and doctors.)

The defining characteristic of this book was: LONG. It wasn't that much longer than some of the other books, but it was over 700 pages and I felt like some of the storylines could and should have been cut out. Will and Alice traveling on the ship, and Peter and Kathryn with the Donner/Reed party were interesting, but took up SO much more time than was necessary. I mean, I was definitely fascinated by the Donner/Reed party, but how come he tried to fit that all in to this storyline? It was overwhelming to keep track of all the different groups. And the most boring storyline was the main body of the pioneers, where most of the Steeds were. I feel like he should have cut out those extraneous storylines and added in more family drama and character development instead... there was basically nothing interesting happening for any of the individuals in the Steed family. I was disappointed that all of a sudden, because he is now baptized, Joshua is basically a cardboard cutout of Nathan, with no personality and no distinguishing traits. He didn't get mad once in this book, and that was basically his default setting in all of the other books. Just because he got baptized doesn't mean he became a robot. I feel like Lund should have had his baptism happen at the end of this book and plotted the books differently so that he included more in the last book and allowed for Joshua's conversion to happen in this one--that would have been a much more interesting way to end the series. In the end, I felt like this book was just a race to get the Saints across the prairie to the Salt Lake Valley, but I still felt like the story was unfinished by the time the book ended--probably because it was... How are they supposed to survive the winter without houses or enough food? Nobody seemed concerned enough about having enough to eat, either at Winter Quarters or in the Salt Lake Valley, even though we'd just witnessed what can happen with the Donner Party.

Overall, not the most satisfying finish to this gargantuan series, but I feel good about having read these again and I enjoyed the process.