A Fireproof Home for the Bride: A Novel
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Family Life › General
ISBN: 1250049679 / Publisher: St. Martin's Press, March 2015
Coming of age in her parents' mid-20th-century rural Lutheran world, Emmeline and her sister, Birdie, are swept up in an ugly family secret when she tries to step outside of strict expectations and marry according to her heart.
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"Emmeline Nelson and her sister Birdie grow up in the hard, cold rural Lutheran world of strict parents, strict milking times, and strict morals. Marriage is preordained, the groom practically predestined. Though it's 1958, southern Minnesota did not seechanging roles for women on the horizon. Caught in a time bubble between a world war and the ferment of the 1960's, Emmy doesn't see that she has any say in her life, any choices at all. Only when Emmy's fiance; shows his true colors and forces himself on her does she find the courage to act--falling instead for a forbidden Catholic boy, a boy whose family seems warm and encouraging after the sere Nelson farm life. Not only moving to town and breaking free from her engagement but getting a job on the local newspaper begins to open Emmy's eyes. She discovers that the KKK is not only active in the Midwest but that her family is involved, and her sense of the firm rules she grew up under--and their effect--changes completely. A FIREPROOF HOME FOR THE BRIDE has the charm of detail that will drop readers into its time and place: the home economics class lecture on cuts of meat, the group date to the diner, the small-town movie theater popcorn for a penny. It also has a love story--the wrong love giving way tothe right--and most of all the pull of a great main character whose self-discovery sweeps the plot forward. The setting is Kent Haruf, but the heroine is pure Annie Proulx"--
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