It’s 1999. Drew Amsel is eighteen and waiting—for his Mormon mission, for his life to begin, for something he can't quite name. Then Iris appears, his best friend's younger sister, and the waiting becomes something else entirely.
The First Taste is a novel about the year before departure: the friends and siblings, who once made the world feel permanent vanishing one by one, a love that arrives at the wrong moment, a best friend whose hidden life will cost him everything, a faith that names desire a sin and sacrifice love's highest form. Set against the extraordinary landscape of the Utah foothills—the canyons, the rivers, the mountains—before crossing continents to the cathedrals and cafés of London and Paris, it is a story about love at the edge of adulthood and the experiences that shape us.
It’s 1999. Drew Amsel is eighteen and waiting—for his Mormon mission, for his life to begin, for something he can't quite name. Then Iris appears, his best friend's younger sister, and the waiting becomes something else entirely.
The First Taste is a novel about the year before departure: the friends and siblings, who once made the world feel permanent vanishing one by one, a love that arrives at the wrong moment, a best friend whose hidden life will cost him everything, a faith that names desire a sin and sacrifice love's highest form. Set against the extraordinary landscape of the Utah foothills—the canyons, the rivers, the mountains—before crossing continents to the cathedrals and cafés of London and Paris, it is a story about love at the edge of adulthood and the experiences that shape us.
I can’t show you the real thing so I’ll describe it.
Young guy, eighteen, white shirt, jeans. Young girl, seventeen, white tank top, also jeans. Radiant. Her, not me. I look good too, I guess. A full head of hair at least. The picture is from 2000. Nineteen years ago…
It’s strange to look at a picture that old, even stranger that the year 2000 is now old. It used to sound so futuristic. Even the way we said it—The Year 2000. Like it was a prophecy. Like time had become something else entirely.
The picture was in a book—The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. She got it for me for Christmas (our first) and I remember being blown away because she was sixteen at the time and what sixteen-year-old knows about W.B. Yeats?
Anyway, it was on page 59, which makes sense. I’m glad I left it there. We always made more sense in that world.
We’re standing in front of her house in the photo, just off the porch, bathed in the pre-dusk haze, shadows on the rose brick behind us, aspen leaves suspended mid-flutter.
It’s summer. We’re in love.
The picture captures it. Not just because we look happy. It’s something else, something intangible sealed in the print—how the world for that small blip of time felt elastic with possibility, charged like the air before a storm.
I wonder what we did that day.
This is the first time I’ve looked at it in a long time. It feels like we should have disappeared like that photo in Back to the Future. One of us or both of us. But we’re still there. We’re still there.
* * *
I left that fall.
I didn’t want to leave her, but I did.
I haven’t really talked about it much since then. Just in the clipped way people talk about things like that. The broad strokes. Not the real thing. People rarely talk about real things.
Sometimes it’s for the best.
I knew and she knew. We were the only ones who ever really knew.
It was better to bury it. It meant it was over, but at least it could retain its aura. At least that’s what I’ve told myself.
It’s a risk to excavate it now. What’s the T.S. Eliot line? …breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire…
Of course, not telling a story comes with its own costs. She’s haunted me for too long. The fact (recently learned) that I’ve also haunted her gives me some strange satisfaction. I’ve wondered at times if we’re cursed, if we cast some kind of soul-spell on each other when we were too young to understand, a spell that loops through time, against our will. But no no… this story begins the release. That’s what art does; it’s a deal.
* * *
Iris, what should I let them see? How should I do this? You said it was a story that had to be told. Big magic, remember?
But understand:
Once it’s done it’s done.
You always lose things in the telling of a story.
One of the things that I love about reading is that each novel takes you to a place apart from you but allows you to experience it comfortably, at your own pace. Sometimes, these stories have points of reference to which you can relate; other times, they are so far distant to anything you've ever known that reading them is like being a voyeur looking through the misty window into your neighbour's house.
I didn't feel voyeuristic reading Joseph Vogel's book but it has taken me somewhere of which I have no knowledge: the life of a Mormon teen. Our narrator is Drew and he is likeable and thoughtful and feels like a safe pair of hands. We learn about his life and especially the importance of his friends, Owen and Greg, all of similar age and all reaching the point in their lives where they are expected to go out and spread the word of Joseph Smith to the rest of the world. And when I mean the rest of the world, it could be anywhere.
This is looming for all of them and some are embracing the process more than others. For Drew, the prospect of leaving his home town is difficult because he has a girlfriend: Owen's younger sister, Iris. Their discovery of each other carefully unfolds throughout the book. Firstly, Drew dealing with his guilt at dating the sister of one of his oldest friends, which feels like a betrayal. Then the development of their relationship which is rich with the exciting newness of love with poetry, letter sharing and the desperation of seeking intimacy. However, this is difficult as they are both too aware that the consequences of their indulgence of each other could be extremely damaging.
This is a gentle love story. Vogel's narrative is honest in its depiction and I could feel the desire, tension and longing and the feeling of wanting to do what is right but not really knowing what that is! It is about people trying to find their way in a life which sets constraints of faith and expectation and of keeping a balance between what they as individuals want, which may contradict that set of values, and being respectful to the society of which they are part.
Vogel conveys this struggle with aplomb and I was pleased to see will continue it in 2027 with a further book.