Bluestem
Four generations of women on the same Kansas farm, from the prairie fire of 1891 through the 1980s, and what a piece of ground becomes when the people on it refuse to give it up. Six novels and a family cookbook.
7 books, in reading order
Where the Bluestem Grows
A Story of Grief, Grit, and Second Chances
Some fires take everything. Others burn away only what was never meant to last. Kansas, 1891. Sarah Townsend has built her life on hard ground and harder work: a whitewashed farmhouse, twenty-six horses, five children, and a husband whose quiet love has carried her through every dry spell and every long winter night. Then a single bolt of dry lightning ignites the prairie, and in one terrible afternoon, everything Sarah believed was certain is gone. Left alone to keep the horses fed, the children safe, and the farm from slipping through her hands, Sarah does not know how she will make it through another winter, let alone another spring. Then a quiet stranger named Jacob Miller rides up the long dirt track with steady eyes and patient hands and offers her help she cannot afford to refuse, and a tenderness she is not ready to want. But the prairie is unforgiving. Town gossip spreads like wildfire. Horse thieves come in the dark. And Sarah must decide whether holding tight to the man she lost is worth turning away from the second chance the wind has carried to her door. A sweeping, tender novel of love after loss on the wide Kansas plains.
Where the Bluestem Bends
Annie's Story
Kansas, 1918. Annie learns what the prairie takes and what it gives back.
Where the Bluestem Stands
Birdie's Story
Kansas, 1934. Birdie comes home to her grandmother's farm as the dust starts to blow.
Where the Bluestem Holds
Ruby's Story
Kansas, 1943. Ruby Smucker is sixteen and keeping the books on the family farm when the Army sends three German prisoners to help with the harvest. There is a name on a casualty list she is still angry about, and she means to keep her distance. Over two harvests and a long winter she watches Franz Weber work the ground the way her own people do. This is quiet historical fiction about the home front, and the first of the Bluestem books.
Where the Bluestem Unites
Joanie and Ruby’s Story
Ruby's story picks up in 1954. Her mother Birdie is gone, and Ruby has the farm, the accounts and the egg cooperative on her shoulders. Her younger sister Joanie comes home from Wichita with a head for numbers Ruby did not know she needed. Then a German farmhand named Franz Weber walks up the lane looking for work. Read Where the Bluestem Holds first if you can.
Where the Bluestem Returns
Erica’s Story: Book Six
Kansas, 1985. The farm crisis is here, and the bank wants everything.
The Bluestem Kitchen
Family Recipes from Six Generations on the Kansas Prairie
Six generations of women. One Kansas farmhouse. Seventy five recipes that were never written down until now.