Why did she edit her wedding-day journal? Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857. Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage.

Why did she edit her wedding-day journal?

Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857. Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage.

In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One reviewer says this story "makes an anonymous woman equal to the most celebrated hero of legend."

Note that the Kindle version includes only the text of the novel. The paperback version includes 24 charcoal illustrations and highlights in a font created from Rosette's own handwriting.

A homesteading farmer, his pregnant wife, their daughter, and the grandmother wake to a beautiful winter morning on the prairie. And then it descends upon them - the infamous Children's Blizzard of 1888. Who will survive?

With characters from ROSETTE: A NOVEL OF PIONEER MICHIGAN, “Blizzard: A Story of Dakota Territory” captures in one sod shanty the dramatic effects of a storm on the bodies and spirits of people who have internal storms of their own.

Cover painting and design by Betsy Marsch, illustrator and cover designer for Rosette: A Novel of Pioneer Michigan.

A collection of 39 pieces by authors of historical fiction, subtitled "Volume 1: Historical Fiction Writers Trace Their Journeys from Starting Point to Finished Work"

"He survived Andersonville, and then his troubles really began." Rosette's brother Solomon's story is outlined in her novel, but his life is so compelling it deserves the deeper treatment in this novel.