Book of Her: Women of the Restoration

In *Book of Her: Women of the Restoration*, author Agnieszka Rutkowska turns her literary gaze toward the women who stood at the edges of one of America's most dramatic religious movements — and asks what it truly cost them to be there. Comprising seven interconnected stories, this remarkable collection gives voice to women whose lives were shaped, strained, and sometimes broken by the early decades of the Latter-day Saint restoration. These are not the names that fill the history books. They are the scribes, the wives, the witnesses — the women who wrote, endured, believed, and doubted in the margins of sacred history. Rutkowska's prose is precise and deeply interior, drawing readers into the private rooms where faith and doubt coexist without resolution. The opening story, following Emma Smith as she transcribes her husband Joseph's revelations, is a masterclass in restrained emotional power. Through the deceptively simple act of putting pen to paper, Emma's world — her sacrifices, her silences, her fiercely maintained dignity — unfolds with devastating clarity. Each repeated gesture, each carefully smoothed page, carries the full weight of a life lived in service to something she can neither fully surrender nor fully trust. What distinguishes this collection is its refusal of easy judgments. Rutkowska neither condemns nor romanticizes. She listens. Her characters are complex women navigating impossible positions — caught between personal faith and institutional demand, between love and self-erasure, between the history being made around them and the private truths they guard alone. Readers drawn to literary fiction that engages seriously with history, spirituality, and the inner lives of women will find this collection unforgettable. *Book of Her* is intimate, precise, and quietly devastating — a book that stays with you long after the final page.