Women's Company - The Minerva GirlsIn the late 1960s, women constituted less than two percent of the U.S. Army, and most Americans agreed that was more than enough girls for any man's army. When three young women enlist in the Women's Army Corps anyway, they discover life is not quite like the recruiters' spiels, leaving them wondering how to make do.
Should they stay and force change or leave and start over elsewhere? How much will a woman give up to get where she belongs? |
Cloud County PersuasionIt’s 1947, and English war bride Marian Parker wonders if she married the wrong Yank after two years of waiting for him and a 5,000-mile voyage from home. Marian’s mother-in-law, the spiky Hazel Anna Parker, thinks so and complicates everything.
And everything in this new land is different. Marian’s husband James assures her that farming in Oklahoma with his parents is only a way station to their new life in California. He promises they’ll soon have a little house in a town by the sea--a house with lemon trees in the front, orange trees in the back, and room for a houseful of kids. The people Marian meets aren’t so sure, and her family back home continues to doubt. What everyone does understand is that the war changed everything, and some of the people who came back alive will never be the same. Harold Hill returns to a family farm with no one left on it, Aaron Law goes back to resurrect his legal practice, and somehow, Danny B. Quick never enlisted. Veterans and non-veterans alike sometimes discover their own back yards aren’t big enough for their future. As Marian’s California dream extends into a vague future, her confrontation with the confusion and loneliness of immigration leads her to take actions never anticipated for her by those she left behind in the United Kingdom. Friends like schoolteacher Hypatia Alexander, who has her own secrets from the war, and recent sorority girl and college grad Deirdre Dailey make all the difference as Marian’s world expands from the farm into a future where so many want to persuade her to take the path they think best. Ultimately, Marian risks everything to save her marriage, and it should work, shouldn’t it? |
Cloud County HarvestIt’s 1951. As the insidious advance of a mid-century drought sidles across the Southern Plains, the Hill and Quick families of Cloud County buckle down to the work at hand. Hard times, extreme drought, and pestilence are not new to them or their neighbors. Tenacity is the key; the question is, how will it change them and the red earth they inherited?
You read Cloud County Persuasion and you want to go back. Cloud County Harvest is your ticket. The plains of Oklahoma are waiting for you. Savor again the evocative sense of place. Inhabit the social and cultural milieu of rural and small-town life. Catch up on the resilient men and women you came to know in Cloud County Persuasion and expand your circle of the people who enrich their lives. |