Tallgrass

New Mercies Natchez, Mississippi, in 1933 is a place suspended in time. The silver and china is still dented and cracked from Yankee invaders. And the houses have names...and memories. Nora Bondurant is running away--from her husband's death, from his secrets, and from the ghosts that dog he...	The Star Garden: A Novel of Sarah Agnes Prine From the bestselling author of These Is My Words comes this exhilarating follow-up to the beloved Sarah’s Quilt. In the latest diary entries of pioneer woman Sarah Agnes Prine, Nancy E. Turner continues Sarah’s extraordinary story as she struggles to make a home in th...	Jubilee Trail The history of California in the mid-19th century comes alive in this captivating historical novel. Garnet Cameron, a fashionable young lady of New York, is leading a neat, proper life, full of elegant parties and polite young men, yet the prospect of actually marrying any of the...	The Persian Pickle Club It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up, and there's not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farm wife, a highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club, a group of local ladies dedicated to improvi...	Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountain...
These is my Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 (P.S.) A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path P...	Loving Frank Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love...	The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Oprah Book Club #62) Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: It's gutsy for a debut novelist to offer a modern take on Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin--particularly one in which the young hero, born mute, communicates with people, dogs, and the occasional ghost through his own mix of sign and body languag...	The Book Thief It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of ...	The Chili Queen: A Novel Life may have been hard on Addie French, but when she meets friendless Emma Roby on a train, all her protective instincts emerge. Emma's brother is seeing her off to Nalgitas to marry a man she has never met. And Emma seems like a lost soul to Addie-someone who needs Addie's savv...

Wisdom earned then learned
After the surprise attack of Pearl Harbor during WWII, President Roosevelt signed an act that forced Japanese American's to be relocated to interment camps. One such camp, built on beet field land in Colorado, brought much change to the small town of Ellis. Rennie, 13, and her family of 5 own the beet farm close to the camp and through this innocent, yet wise little girl we learn the perils of such a blatant act of prejudice. Rennie and her family find the Japanese American's to be good people, thus hiring them for farming and help within their home to the chagrin and chastising of many residents of Ellis. Much upheaval brews, including the rape and sodomy of a Susan Riddick, a young friend of Rennie's. Enraged that something this heinous hadn't happened in their little town before the "Japs" came, many Ellis residents blame the Japanese American internees. There in lies a mystery entwined into a book about people unnerved by change and riled by ignorance. Sandra Dallas's characters are always "everyday" folk. Their wisdom comes from the college of hard knocks and how they learn is determined by their ability to process life as a burden or a gift. Adding a mystery to her plots keeps the reader engrossed, unsettled, angered and ultimately richer in knowledge. That is what a great book is suppose to do and Sandra Dallas delivers with a one-two punch. I highly recommend this lovely book

Wonderful summer read
This was a wonderful book. The writing style of the author was unfamiliar to me, as this was the first book of her's I have read. I really enjoyed the time period, World War II, and especially that it was written about what was going on back here in the U.S. I think there are a lot of books written about this war, but they are almost always about the battle, not how life went on while war was being waged. I am very interested in Japanese culture and this described quite a bit about the internment camps and the people who endured them. I also especially liked the main character, and her family.

Novel
Loved it. Based on history it gave an interesting perspective in contrast to Snow on Cedars which also is a great book.

Growing up during WW2
Rennie is a 13 year old girl growing up in the early 1940's in Colorado. A time of life and place that should be idyllic if not for the war that burst upon the nation. The main impact of the war is that a Japanese Internment camp is created not far from town and close to Rennie's farm where her father, mother, and older brother grow beets for sugar. The war does impact everyone in another way also. The town's boys and young men are drafted or volunteer to serve and some of them are captured or die as a result of that. Once the camp is in place, and the Japanese move in, the townspeople split amongst those who are bigotted and hate-filled and those who are willing to tolerate and even support the Americans of Japanese descent that are in their midst. Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse when one of Rennie's schoolmates is savagely murdered and raped even though she is crippled by Polio. This almost tears up the town as the bigotted side assumes that a Japanese did it, while the others are willing to let the Sheriff find out what happened. The story's focus is on growing up and the challenges that being a dirt-poor sugar beet farm family have to overcome. There is a lot of trouble in the town of Ellis, Colorado and not all of it is due to the japanese. The only other close friend of Rennie's is forced to miss part of her school year to supposedly help out in her father's hardware store when he takes ill and cannot take care of things. Idyllic, the town is not. Between morphine addicts, murderers, rapists, and wife beaters, the townsfolk are painted in a mostly negative light. Couple that with the bigotry against the Mexicans and the Japanese and you wonder how the U.S. became as accepting and liberal of a country as it is. To counter the negativism we see the struggles of the Strouds and the other few decent human beings in the town who present the best of American attitudes and values. The various crimes committed in the book are ultimately resolved in a way that is supposed to be satisfying and the murderer of the young girl is found and captured - and, of course, is NOT of Japanese descent - but overall I was left with a bad taste in my mouth when finished this book as it was overall very dark and showed more of the negative side of life. There was very little character development and the main subjects in the book were more cartoons than real people.

Great Book
I really enjoyed this book. It brought up a lot of very heavy issues without getting to emotional. It was a page turner that had a very happy ending.