I liked Worthing until the end, however, with FotF I hated it from just about the first page.
Well I really really liked the first "chapter" (don't know what else to call them), until it started getting grotesquely mormon. I don't have a problem with mormon characters, but when the author relies on the hope that you'll feel all wholesome when someone is converted, he fails to make other areas interesting.
I can't agree here, really.
Digressing, it's not a novel with chapters, it's a collection of short stories, and in the edition I read, at least, he had another piece that explained how they came to be written, not in the "historical order" for that universe, but filling in back story with other stories. I think he also said in something somewhere else that he'd been wanting to do a universe about Community, specifically Mormon Community, since that's the one that he fits in and knows best of any.
I wouldn't call it "grotesquely" Mormon, it's just plain Mormon. And as a Christian, I _did_ feel all wholesome about the Baptism, even though it's not my kind of Baptism, as I also did in Lost Boys. It could just as easily have been a Christian Church Baptism, if that had been the community that Teague fell in with, and found a home and a community within.
Well he layed it on pretty thick with the whole "Wah. The baptists were mean to us. Wah!" it was no fun.
And I'd call that just plain offensive, trivializing the survivors of a genocide-- and yes, I do believe that Baptists as a group are capable of genocide, as are most human groups when they fall prey to mob psychology (which he also portrayed in one of the Speaker books, aimed at the piggies).
Card was recasting Mormon history of persecution, which is a part of American History that I've known all my life, first before the migration to Utah, and a couple of generations later when the Army went to Utah, shattered polygamous families by force, and put the husbands and fathers of those families in jail. While I'm not necessarily in favor of polygamy, and it can be very cruel to some women, given the nature of human males (not all of you) to regard women as property and not human, some women (with some husbands) function in that system very well. Ideally, I'd think the feds should have _asked_ the women, individually, if they wanted to opt out, and arranged for transportation and support of those who did, with the children who went with them, somewhere else, thus not taking a hard-and-fast line. In general, it _was_ persecution, and before the migration, there was quite a lot of mob-violence, blood and murder and lynching.
You're right about one thing, though, genocide is not "fun", no more than is Xenocide "fun."
And btw, just in case folks haven't noticed, I'm not a Mormon, though I've studied them some, my mother-in-law's brother was RLDS and Baptized her (I don't think it took: she was secular to the end of her life, but she said it made him feel better about her soul).
But I'm an Episcopalian.