Showing Journey (If Where You're Going Isn't Home) by Max Zimmer

Journey, recipient of a Foreword Clarion Five Star Review, is the first book of the coming-of-age trilogy If Where You're Going Isn't Home by prize-winning short story writer and author Max Zimmer.

Spring of 1956. Shake Tauffler hears a line of music on the radio of a cattle truck and discovers his dream to play jazz trumpet. His family is moving one last time – from a southern Utah ranch to a town outside Salt Lake – on his father’s quest to bring his family from Switzerland to the heartland of the Mormon church. In two months, when he turns twelve, he’ll join his buddies on a shared journey through the ranks, rituals, lessons, and duties of his father’s take-no-prisoners religion. At the same time, armed with a used trumpet and his bike, he’ll start another journey, on his own, to a place whose high priests aren’t his father’s friends but the negro greats of jazz, men he’s supposed to believe are cursed but from whose music he learns everything he dreams of being.

Shaded with Huck Finn and James Dean, Shake Tauffler is an American kid we all recognize, a kid who responds to bigotry, abuse, hypocrisy, and even death with courage, humor, heartbreak, often pain, and always wonder. His rites of passage are keenly drawn and vividly familiar. But his ten-year story of growing up Mormon in America takes us to an altogether different place. Lyrical, rowdy, unflinching, Journey follows Shake across the first four years of his ten-year search for the clarity and flight of a trumpet line to lift him like a steel bird out from under the iron sky of his faith and guide him to sexual, moral, and musical consciousness. It is a search that resolves – for now – in startling and extraordinary tenderness.

Michael Strong, literary agent and co-founder of Zola Books, describes the book this way:

“Max Zimmer has written The Great American Mormon Novel. For decades, readers have depended upon a few extraordinary writers to understand fully what it means to be an American – Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, Ralph Ellison, Erica Jong, John Updike. Zimmer has added a critical new dimension to our shared national understanding of who we are and how we got here in this sweeping narrative. Twelve-year-old Shake Tauffler’s decade-long journey through the Mormon Church and beyond will resonate with all Americans who ponder their soul and place in our changing national portrait.”