The story of the Bergson family and their friends and neighbors. Describes the pioneers' struggle for survival in the barren, underdeveloped Nebraska tableland.

"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his...

Kirsten and her family celebrate their first Christmas in their new home on Uncle Olav's farm in mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota

A tough Minnesota winter brings many changes to Kirsten's frontier life, including the new responsibility of helping her brother Lars set his traps and a move into a new house for her family

"In rural Iowa, life is both the planter and uprooter of dreams. As love, long delayed, springs to life in the heart of a young Swedish immigrant, one man struggles with his withered ambitions--and new blessings that could take their place if he would but allow them room."--Page 4 of cover.

In 1904 South Bend, Indiana, recently married Hilda Johansson Cavanaugh struggles with her adjustment from being a servant to that of the wife to the affluent Patrick. Worse she finds herself isolated from her spouse's upper crust family and friends while her former working class peers snub her. Despite her unsettling circumstances, Hilda agrees to help her only remaining friend Norah O'Neill after the police arrest Norah's husband Sean, accusing...

Ten-year-old Kirsten regrets the promise she has made to a ragged boy she discovers alone near a wrecked covered wagon not far from her Minnesota home

This is a fictionalized account of Charlotta Johnson's life as she and her husband build a farmstead on the Kansas prairie