Everything you wanted to know about Byuck! but were much too discriminating to ask (a very brief interview with the author)
Is Byuck the story of two friends, but you're not sure which two friends?
Yeah, kinda.
Is byuck the overwhelming feeling of having your whole life in front of you yet no idea which things to do are the important things to do?
If you want, I guess.
Is carrying Byuck on public transit more likely to make me new friends or get me mugged?
Why not both?
Is it okay if I send Byuck to family members with no sense of humor who are likely to be outraged and complain on Nextdoor?
So long as you pay full price.
2000 seems like a long time ago. Do you expect me to believe they had such things as sexual hangups and miniature golf?
That's the magic of fiction. Anything's possible!
I'm writing a paper on Provo in the year 2000. Can I count this as a primary source?
Who's your professor?
Praise for Byuck!
Hilarious, heartwarming, and refreshing.
—William Morris (link to the full review)
If you ever wanted to know what would have happened if Godot had shown up, read Byuck, wherein coffee tables are transgressive and Billy Joel claims to be innocent. I LOL’d. For real. Not like you do online where you just kind of huff with a mouth twitch. No, I totally LOL’d. Woke up the cat.
—Moriah Jovan
It’s worth mentioning that Byuck isn’t just another instance of Mormon screwball realism, which is basically a genre that tends to hide its Mormonness as much as it flaunts it. For one thing, it’s more kinetic, more flighty. . . . Like Steven Peck’s The Scholar of Moab and A Short Stay in Hell, Byuck isn’t your parents’ Mormon novel. For instance, you can see the influence of postmodernism on it–yet Jepson never lets the novel feel like some rerun from the tail end of the twentieth century. . . . I prefer to call it (let’s aim high here) paradoxical realism—nay, Mormon Paradoxical Realism—for the way it constantly tries to undercut and contradict itself. Byuck, after all, is absurd realism, a celebratory critique of Mormon sexual mores. It champions artistic creation with a crappy rock opera. It parades as light reading in order to posture as literary fiction. . . . Byuck is simply a great book. A pleasure to read. It might even be the funniest novel about Mormons writing a rock opera that you will read this year.
—Scott Hales
THIS BOOK IS HILARIOUS! READ IT, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! READ IT!! READ IT!!! YOU WON’T REGRET IT! IT’S FANTASTIC!!!
—Scott Hales, The Association for Mormon Letters
Jepson’s style is so unique and his voice is so fresh, you won’t for a minute feel like you’re reading the same old story about BYU students. Instead, it’s literary and comedic tongue-in-cheek writing, following a stream of consciousness with a great plot. . . . There are so many layers to the story. . . . We have college-student hijinks, of course, because this is BYU, but we also have romance, and philosophy, and moments of contemplation that loop right back around to being quirky. I have to say, I enjoyed every minute of this read. It truly was out of the box.
—Tristi Pinkston (link to the full review)
This is a crazy book. It’s chaotic but hilariously funny. . . . I kept thinking of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The plot’s not similar but it has some of that creative chaos that makes Confederacy so memorable.
—Doug Gibson (link to the full review)
If Dave Eggers had gone to BYU, this is what he would have written. A pitch-perfect voice and a lot of very funny lines.
—Stephen Carter
What I must conclude is that readers will be surprised at how much they enjoy this book and will unexpectedly think positively about things they pretty much had promised themselves they would never think positively about again. Which can, ultimately, be an unexpectedly okay thing, Phyoo.
—Julie J. Nichols, Association for Mormon Letters
Meet Julie:
To know her is to love her. The only bad things to have happened to her are too many good things. When she walks down the street, birds call her name and the sun smiles more broadly.
I do not know how you will stand her.
Hilarious, subversive, reflective, and poignant, this novel is a revolving portrait that perfectly captures the BYU single experience and the internal and external tensions faced by Latter-day Saint women.
–Katherine Cowley, award-winning LDS author
Reading this book is like catching an affectionate wink from the guy who sits on the back row in Gospel Doctrine class smiling to himself as he does crossword puzzles on his phone so that you think he’s not listening but who always comes out with the comment that turns the discussion into something bigger, something that matters.
Jepson treats his characters—these glorious, quirky, hilarious young people trying to figure out their places in the world, trying to understand their own hearts—with humor, yes, but also with a subtle tenderness, so that we recognize their yearnings.
This book is as fun as a pick-up game of Pictionary, but just when you think it’s all Peanut M&Ms and Twizzlers, holiness appears as if on a silver tray passed by the deacons.
The ending sneaks up on you like your home teacher (minister) on a unicycle bearing mint brownies, and, like him, is sweet and surprisingly healing.
The sunset our Classic Protagonist rides off into is a different sunset than she had thought she was aiming for, a better sunset, and that makes all the difference. It makes this book true.
—Darlene Young, author of Here
Just Julie’s Fine is a cavalcade of quirky characters, a promenade of “peculiar people.” And though the story is ostensibly about the title character, each individual in this book is a well-rounded person in their own right. Some of them I couldn’t help but love, others drove me crazy, but every last one was entertaining. Readers should get their popcorn now, because they won’t want to miss a second of the laughter, tenderness, dating drama, and self-discovery in this delightful little book.
—Jeanine Bee, fiction editor at Wayfare
What if Barbie went to BYU? What if Elle Woods had majored in Marriage, Family, and Human Development instead of Fashion Merchandising? The arc of Julie Them's sophomore-year quest for self-knowledge is just as satisfying, and it's always a blast to spend time with characters in Jepson's Thuniverse.
—Luisa Perkins, author of Prayers in Bath
Molly Mormon, Patty Perfect—they pale in comparison to Just Julie, the unlikely protagonist of Just Julie’s Fine. A wizard at lampooning stereotypes, Theric Jepson introduces us to a panoply of BYU students, both endearing and annoying. The references range from Shakespeare to Star Trek, the settings from Costco to Rootbeeragogo. The author clearly had a lot of fun writing this playful novel, and the reader should have a lot of fun reading it—and determining if it passes the Bechdel test!
—Karen Rosenbaum, AML Award-winning author
"Just Julie’s fine, thank you. Read it, find yourself thinking in snappy sentences the rest of the day, and smile."
—Julie J Nichols, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air (read the full AML review here)
The novel satirizes BYU dating culture and Mormon culture generally, somewhat straightforwardly at first...and approaching greater sensitivity and realism with each subsequent narrator.... The world of Jepson’s BYU is a joy to inhabit, and his novel is a tangent-following gambol.... But an unsettling current lurks beneath the surface....
—Alison Brimley, multiple AML Awards winner (read the full review in Dialogue here)