Ocean State Libraries

"The novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile...

"A frontier woman now, she had triumphed over the worst life could offer -- or had she?" --

In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril--the Kansas Indian Territory. The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone,...

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers,...

History is thick with secrets in The Sugar Camp Quilt, seventh in the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series from bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini. Set in Creek's Crossing, Pennsylvania, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the novel follows Dorothea Granger's passage from innocence to wisdom against the harrowing backdrop of the American struggle over slavery. She discovers that a quilt she has stitched for her uncle Jacob with five unusual patterns...

"In the early 20th century, new schoolteacher Beth Thatcher is assigned a post in a remote mining community in Western Canada. There her courage--and her heart--will be tested in unexpected ways"--

"When a young girl goes into labor aboard the stagecoach taking her to Springwater, virtuous dance hall girl Savannah Rigbey assists the doctor, Prescott Parrish, with the delivery and finds true love with the gruff physician, a man tormented by dark memories of the Civil War." --

A marriage of convenience blossoms into heartfelt love in a pioneer setting in the Old West. Fiction in the Little-House-on-the-Prairie tradition.

In pioneer Nebraska, a woman leads where no man will go. Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Tommy Lee Jones, The Homesman is a devastating story of early pioneers in 1850s American West. It celebrates the ones we hear nothing of: the brave women whose hearts and minds were broken by a life of bitter hardship. A "homesman" must be found to escort a handful of them back East to a sanitarium. When none of the county's men steps up, the job...

Julia's Last Hope is a story sent in a lumbertown in western Canada. Things are going well for John and Julia Harrigan until the sudden news of the mill closing rocks their secure world. Julia's dreams for her family seem to be crumbling around her until she decides to fight to save the home and town she loves.