Cheerleaders from Gomorrah

Above all else, the characters in John Rember's second book of stories value hedonism, physical beauty, and athletic prowess. They attempt to ski, run, bicycle, ride, dance, and copulate their way to salvation. But readers of the Old Testament and The Book of Morman will also recognize that Rember's people live in places watched over by an unforgiving God, a God unamused by humankind's pretentious claims to Eden in the Post-Ironic Recreational West.

And yet, despite their comic insistence upon looking for redemption in all the wrong places, Rember's characters also earn delicate, glittering, impossible moments of joy and grace.