Nineteen-year-old Aldine McKenna is stuck at home with her sister and aunt in a Scottish village in 1929 when two Mormon missionaries ring the doorbell. Aldine’s sister converts and moves to America to marry, and Aldine follows, hoping to find the life she’s meant to lead and the person she’s meant to love.
In New York, Aldine answers an ad soliciting a teacher for a one-room schoolhouse in a place she can’t possibly imagine: drought-stricken Kansas. She arrives as farms on the Great Plains have begun to fail and schools are going bankrupt, unable to pay or house new teachers. With no money and too much pride to turn back, she lives uneasily with the family of Ansel Price – the charming, optimistic man who placed the ad – and his family responds to her with kind curiosity, suspicion, and, most dangerously, love. Just as she’s settling into her strange new life, a storm forces unspoken thoughts to the surface that will forever alter the course of their lives.
Laura McNeal’s novel is a sweeping and timeless love story about leaving – and finding – home.
Reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie, written for adults. I have to admit this was the first amazon first pick that I’ve gotten that I’ve really enjoyed. It’s a steady, well written story that keeps you moving forward. It’s not suspenseful, but it seemed very well researched, and the characters were fleshed out so fully you had to follow their story, their heartbreak was yours. You were able to really relate to the characters.Â
Beautiful and sad This is a very descriptive story as it deftly draws you into the Dustbowl Era of depression era Kansas. The writer paints a full picture of the depressing lives of families trying to survive each day as hope dwindles. A young woman from Scotland immigrates first to New York to live with her married sister and later answers a newspaper advertisement for a teacher needed in a small town in Kansas. Having no knowledge of where Kansas is geographically or what it’s like, she travels there after…
My Emotions Are Still Reeling – Just Fabulous Just finished Amazon First Book March 2017 “The Practice House by Laura McNeal”.Been sitting here trying to decide how to review it without spoilers. First, I think that Laura McNeal is a very talented writer. She has taken a great cast of characters, set them in the Depression time, added even more sombre situations, thrown in a love triangle, the Kansas dust storms and had them work through all of it. Her ability to take all the emotions, mix them up and let it flow through its course and…