Summer Reading 2011

In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They made their way by spring wagon to the tiny settlement of Elkhead, where they lived with a family of homesteaders. In their buoyant letters home, the two women captured the voices and stories of the pioneer women, the children, and the other memorable people they got to know. Nearly a hundred years later, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden—the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff—found the letters and began to reconstruct the women’s journey.

From the author of New York Times bestselling novels Whiter Than Snow and Prayers for Sale comes a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who have all lived in the same Victorian home called the Bride’s House.

This is a wonderful children's history book and a unique fictional first-and-third-person narrative that allows readers to get to know these women through their actions and thoughts, as well as the observations and opinions of those who knew them. Sidebars link the fictional narrative to documented historical events, and a bibliography offers resources for further research on each woman.