Book Review: Beyond the Mapped Stars by Rosalyn Eves

Beyond the Mapped Stars(Knopf, 2021), by emerita Segullah staffer Rosalyn Collings Eves, captures the paradoxes of being a contemporary Latter-day Saint woman and places them in a historical setting: 1878 Utah, Wyoming, and Denver. Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Bertelsen dreams of becoming an astronomer, of leaving her rural polygamous home and her mother’s expectations in Monroe, Utah, to study science and learn about the stars. When her sister Rebekka needs help with her first pregnancy, Elizabeth travels to Wyoming, and from there to Denver to follow her dreams and see the 1878 eclipse. Beyond the Mapped Stars spoke in a healing way to issues I’ve wrestled with for my entire adult life.

The book is gorgeously written, and layered in a way that serves both its story and the contemporary audience reading it. Two favorite passages:

Elizabeth helps Rebecca before her labor, participating in the then-commmon practice of women anointing and blessing mothers before giving birth:

I think of the chain of women I’ve suddenly become part of, all of us linked by faith and hope on the cusp of life (and sometimes death), and a dormant sense of wonder stirs in me. I thought I’d mastered the trick of looking at my life aslant, like the starlit sky, to make the lights seem brighter. But maybe I haven’t been looking at it right at all, because all I’ve seen of my mother’s life–of my future life–is the hard work. I’ve missed entirely this sense of being part of something bigger than yourself.

This passage brilliantly shows the tension between the weighty expectations placed on LDS women, and also the joyful possibilities that get forgotten or overlooked beneath all the work of bearing and raising children. I love the way Eves explores this back and forth between Elizabeth and the women in her life: her mother, who wants her to become a polygamous second wife and raise a family; her sister Rebekka, who encourages her to follow her dreams and recapture her childhood delight in the world; the female scientists she meets in Denver, who question whether she can be both a Mormon and a scientist; and her friend Alice, who teaches her to pursue her personal dreams and still connect with the world around her. I found it very insightful that Elizabeth needs a kind of permission from other women to move forward with her dreams, and that the burden of her mother’s teachings holds her back. It parallels the way women continue to perceive each other today: we want each other to make the same sacrifices that we have, because it validates us. The passage feels simultaneously current and timeless.

Elizabeth worshipping at home on a Sunday:

Closing my eyes, I let the murmured voices swirl around me. Ours is no fine chapel, of carved stone and colored glass windows, that invites awe and reverence. But with my back against the cool wood, a hushed sensation rises in me, a stillness I sometimes name as the Holy Spirit. It’s the same sense I get lying on the ground beneath a star-studded sky, of being part of something much bigger than me. Here, in the curious anonymity one gets in a group, there’s a blessed pause where I don’t have to be anything other than who I am.

Sometimes going to church is like trying to study anatomy and stumbling up against gaps too big to fill with what I know. But other times the sky clears, and I catch glimpses of the infinite.

The writing here is so perfect; it’s hard to write religious experiences well, and this is spot on. The sensory details fit Elizabeth’s character and also convey a real sense of truth behind Elizabeth’s experiences so that the divine becomes real and believable instead of preachy or contrived. Other religious passages work similarly well,

I almost quoted the last two paragraphs, because they’re sublime, but I think to really appreciate them you need to read the entire book, to properly ground Elizabeth’s final epiphany. This is a book to explore and heal the paradoxes of traditional women’s roles versus women’s dreams, and of believers versus scientists. Treat yourself to this story, and the solid hope of Elizabeth Bertelsen’s starry dreams.