A Sky without Stars
April 1st, 2014. Filed under: Tuesday's Tempting Reads.
About Quilts of Love: Quilts tell stories of love and loss, hope and faith, tradition and new beginnings. The Quilts of Love series focuses on the women who quilted all of these things into their family histories. A new book releases each month and features contemporary and historical romances as well as women’s fiction and the occasional light mystery. You will be drawn into the endearing characters of this series and be touched by their stories.
A Sky without Stars
Linda S. Clark
In 1951, Frankie Chasing Bear is a Lakota caught between cultures. She wants to raise her son Harold to revere his Lakota heritage, but she knows he will need to become as a white man to succeed. After his father’s killed in a barroom brawl, Harold and Frankie move to Arizona, where she begins a Lakota Star pattern quilt for Harold with tribal wisdom sung, sewn and prayed into it.
She distrusts Christians, as her own parents were forced to convert at an Indian School, until she meets BIA agent Nick Vandergriff, a half-Lakota who’s also caught between cultures. Nick must convince Frankie that white men and Christians aren’t all bad as he tries to win her heart in order to put the stars back into her sky.
ISLAND BREEZES
Frankie just wants to leave the past behind and start a new life with just her son, Harold. She didn’t make it all the way to her goal destination before her aging truck gave out on her in a little burg outside Phoenix.
A new life wouldn’t be easy for a Lakota woman and child in a white man’s world in the early 50s, but Frankie was determined that her son would know and treasure his Lakota heritage while attending the white man’s school. Harold didn’t care what his mother thought. All he really wanted was to go back to Pine Ridge.
Frankie had hope when Nick came into her life – hope for Harold and maybe a little for herself, as well. Still she wasn’t going to trust him too much. He was a man with a foot in two worlds. It appeared that he was becoming too much like the white man.
It’s not too likely that they’ll become a family, but the do become good friends.
Thank you, Ms Clare, for this story. I didn’t want to put the book down. It combines too things that touch me. My mother was a quilter and my heart has a special love for the Lakota nation.
***A special thank you to litfuse for providing a review copy.***
Linda S. Clare is an award-winning coauthor of three books, including Lost Boys and the Moms Who Love Them (with Melody Carlson and Heather Kopp), Revealed: Spiritual Reality in a Makeover World, and Making Peace with a Dangerous God (with Kristen Johnson Ingram). She is also the author of The Fence My Father Built. She has taught college-level creative writing classes for seven years, and edits and mentors writers. She also is a frequent writing conference presenter and church retreat leader. She and her husband of thirty-one years have four grown children, including a set of twins. They live in Eugene, Oregon, with their five wayward cats: Oliver, Xena the Warrior Kitty, Paladine, Melchior, and Mamma Mia!
Learn more about Linda at: http://www.lindasclare.com