1. A Sweetness to the Soul
After a childhood tragedy in pioneer Oregon, Jane Herbert begins a long search for forgiveness, affection and a home she can trust. Her relationship with a dreamer sixteen years her senior challenges family expectations while settlement along the Deschutes demands resilience from a girl becoming wife,…
2. Love to Water My Soul
An abandoned white child is rescued and raised among Oregon’s Paiute people, where she becomes Shell Flower and learns a language of family and belonging different from that of settler society. When she is cast out, she must enter the white world carrying memories and loyalties…
3. A Gathering of Finches
On the turn-of-the-century Oregon coast, the marriage of Cassie and Louis Simpson is observed through Cassie, her sister and an Indigenous servant whose position reveals the unequal world surrounding the household. Money and development create influence, but they cannot protect the family from infidelity, resentment or…
4. Mystic Sweet Communion
In 1900 Ivy Cromartie Stranahan joins her husband Frank at a remote trading post on Florida’s New River and becomes one of the region’s first English-speaking teachers. Her work with Seminole children grows into advocacy, even as tribal leaders distrust the missionary assumptions and government pressures…