Lydia Blankenship and her husband, Jim, lost their own little girl years ago to a medical mishap. It took Lydia nearly thirty years to stop hating the nurse who administered the wrong medicine. Now, she and Jim are once again in parental bliss as the legal guardians for Lydia’s charming five-year-old grandniece, Gracie. The girl’s mother, however—recently released from prison for drug-related theft—plots to kidnap […]
Danielle Grant is a talented and successful gold trader who lost her mother in college. Since graduate school, she has done little more than work, take care of her ailing father, and go on periodic dates with divorced, older men who are as uninterested in a relationship as she is. Her life takes a dramatic turn when she takes a job in Zurich and meets […]
Fears and secrets are the dragons we each must face… In need of his own redemption, Noah Carter finally confronts his childhood hero, the once-beloved uncle who betrayed him. Instead of vengeance, he offers forgiveness, also granting Uncle John a most curious request—for Noah to work on the ramshackle farm of Agnes Deveraux Keller, a French WWII survivor with dementia. Despite all Agnes has lost, […]
A novel in seven stories. These stories trace the arc of a family narrative in which mothers abandon their children for the best of reasons, fierce daughters reclaim their heritage, and the gap between spiritual health and the expectations of LDS culture affects the outcome of every episode. Poet Annie MacDougal, feminist Riva Maynard, and Riva’s daughter Katie spiral in and out of these seven […]
Fifteen-year-old Loretta slips out of her bedroom every evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean’s teenage nephew Jason falls hard for Loretta. A Zeppelin […]
From the outside, Kirk and Jamie appear to have a beautiful home and the perfect marriage. Inside, the aging Craftsman is falling apart, their marriage is crumbling from neglect, and Jamie Royce wants out! Kirk, on the other hand, isn’t ready to give up on either the house or their relationship. With their divorce scheduled for the day after their daughter’s high school graduation, Jamie […]
As WWII ration cards and battle scars become commonplace across America, it seems to Evelyn that even love is rationed out. When she finds a message from her late husband tucked inside a music box, Jim’s words have the power to change her life: Don’t die with me. Words written out of love, long-lost but never forgotten. Grief stricken, Evelyn is unsure of how to […]
Dear Luke, First let me say—I love you…I didn’t want to leave you… Luke Richardson has returned home after burying Natalie, his beloved wife of sixteen years, ready to face the hard job of raising their three children alone. But there’s something he’s not prepared for—a blue envelope with his name scrawled across the front in Natalie’s handwriting, waiting for him on the floor of […]
Greg’s feet suddenly became very heavy and his head very light as he stood and watched the opening of the bars that had kept him separated from the world.… If not for the knowledge that his sister would be waiting outside to take him home and that he had two children at home waiting for him he might have preferred to turn around and ask […]
The female protagonists of these fourteen short stories are daughters of devout Mormon women. Some choose to leave the family faith; some choose to stay. All hum the hymns of their forebears. They are women of the American West, but some have also journeyed a bit beyond those borders. One swims in a tributary of the Colorado; another dips her elbow into the Ganges. Each […]